Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

apter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is mber of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” Hi andfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed b Ellison’s Life and Career lling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traito l my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised hi n, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to over me ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to deat d destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wid en.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it Manin fact, it is speaking up tha was advised to keep Invisible quiet when, ables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explain g that he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed i ts place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on hi athbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “bee traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” H vised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I wan u to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agre to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomi bust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes somethin “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able t derstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it i eaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with th visible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-workin mily that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocate is philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’ ther that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in th emy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in th on’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’e th grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swolle u till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking advic at becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he i ver quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep quie en, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapter ens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a member o hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfa er advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling th visible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my bor ys, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live wit ur head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em wit ses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruc on, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It wa ocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to th

Ralph Ellison:

pter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is aC ber of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” Hism ndfather this philosophy on his deathbed byg Ralphadvocated Ellison: Invisible Man ling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitort my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised hisa “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to over-s e ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to deathc destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust widea n.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse”o he Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it.t was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up thatH bles change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explain-e that he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed ini place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his thbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “beend raitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” Hea ised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I wanta to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agreey to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit’ ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes somethingo a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able too erstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it isu aking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with thes isible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-workingI ily that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocatedf s philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’st her that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in thef my’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in thee n’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’eml h grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swollerw till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking advicey t becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he ist er quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep quietn n, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1w ns with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a member ofo ard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfa-a r advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling thet isible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my bornI s, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live withd r head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em withy es, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruc-y n, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It wast cking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to thes

aChapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he smember of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” ygrandfather advocated this philosophy on and hisCareer deathbed Ellison’s Life rtelling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a tra sall my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised -son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to o s s hcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to de eand destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust w ”open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a cu .to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand tHe was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up t -enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man expl ning that he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed s its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on ndeathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “b ea traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” tadvised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I w eyou to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, ag t’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vo gor bust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes someth oof “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite abl sunderstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, i Invisible espeaking up that enables Man change. Chapter 1 opens with gInvisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-work dfamily that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advoca sthis philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible M efather that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in GERALD ARLY eenemy’s country.” He advised his son, E“Live with your head in mlion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine rwith grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swol eyou till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking ad sthat becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as h tnever quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep qu 1when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapte fopens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a member -a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His gran ether advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling nInvisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my b hdays, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live w hyour head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em w -yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and dest stion, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It eshocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to

Writers and Their Works

Ralph Ellison:

Marshall Cavendish Benchmark 99 White Plains Road Tarrytown, NY 10591 www.marshallcavendish.us Copyright © 2010 by Marshall Cavendish Corporation All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holders. All websites were available and accurate when this book was sent to press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Early, Gerald Lyn. Ralph Ellison: invisible man / by Gerald Early. p. cm. -- (Writers and their works) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A biography of writer Ralph Ellison that describes his era, his major work—Invisible Man—his life, and the legacy of his writing”—Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-0-7614-4699-6 1. Ellison, Ralph. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 3. African American novelists—Biography. I. Title. PS3555.L625Z65 2009 818'.5409—dc22 2008050181 Publisher: Michelle Bisson Art Director: Anahid Hamparian Series Designer: Sonia Chagbatzanian Photo research by Lindsay Aveilhe and Linda Sykes Picture Research, Inc., Hilton Head, SC The photographs in this book are used by permission and through the courtesy of: Bernard Gotfryd/Hulton Archive/Getty Images: cover, 2; allposters.com: 6; Library of Congress: 10; Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress/Getty Images: 12; Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 15; Cover, One O’Clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils by Douglas Henry Daniels. Beacon Press, Boston ©2006 Douglas Henry Daniels: 20; Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images: 21; Bettmann/Corbis: 29, 31, 54; Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 41; Urbano Delvalle/Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images: 43; Nancy Siesel/The New York Times/Redux: 44; Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 46, 53; Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos: 49; The Granger Collection: 50, 76; Ulf Aderson/ Getty Images: 57; Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images: 59; Courtesy of the artist: 62; weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty: 114. Printed in Malaysia 135642

Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” grandfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a tra all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to o come ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to de and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust w open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a cu Introduction 7 to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand He was advised to keep quiet when, fact, it is speaking Chapter 1. Ellison’s Lifeinand Career 11 up t enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man expl 2. The Negro and Beyond: ing that heChapter is a member of New a hard-working family that “stayed The Age of Ellison 47 its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on deathbed by telling Invisible Man’s Man father that he Chapter 3. the Reading Invisible 63 had “b a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country. Works 118 advised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I w you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, ag Filmography 119 ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they v Chronology 120someth or bust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite Notes 126 abl understand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, i Further 131 with speaking up that Information enables change. Chapter 1 opens Invisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-work Bibliography 132 family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advoca Index on his deathbed by telling the Invisible 135 this philosophy M father that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swol you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking ad that becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as h never quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep q when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapt opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a membe a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His gran ther advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my b days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live w your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em w yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and dest tion, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to

Contents

hapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” is grandfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by elling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor ll my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his on, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to vercome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to eath and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something f “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to nderstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it s speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the nvisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-workng family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advoated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible an’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a py in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your ead in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, ndermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, et ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was hocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to the nvisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. He as advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that nables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man xplaining that he is a member of a hard-working family that tayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosphy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father hat he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the nemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in he lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, underine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em woller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking RALPH ELLISON WAS CONTROVERSIAL DURING HIS LATER , BUT HIS dvice that becomes something of “a curse” toYEARS the Invisible Man, NOVEL, INVISIBLE MAN, REMAINS HIGHLY VISIBLE AND WIDELY READ. s he is never quite able to understand it. He was advised to eep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables hange. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining hat he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his eathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” e advised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I ant you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, gree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till

Introduction

The thing to do is to exploit the meaning of the life you have. —Ralph Ellison, 1960 RALPH ELLISON’S two major loves were music and literature. During the first half of the twentieth century, these were virtually the only artistic fields that offered the possibility of success and fame to a young African-American man. When Ellison failed as a professional musician, he turned to writing. It was at this literary endeavor that Ellison triumphed, gaining critical acclaim and solidifying his place in American history. As an adolescent and young adult, Ellison hoped for a career as a classical trumpeter and symphony composer. However, he also loved jazz, which was very popular among both blacks and whites in the United States until the end of World War II. When Ellison failed at becoming a composer, he tried his hand at creative writing, penning one of the most highly regarded novels in American literature, Invisible Man, which was published in 1952. His training in classical music and his knowledge and admiration of jazz, blues, and gospel music gave him a considerable sense of craftsmanship. He worked equally hard at making himself a good musician and a good writer. Ellison also established himself as a formidable literary critic, writing book reviews and essays for small Communist-sponsored literary magazines.

7

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Invisible Man is the only novel by Ellison that was published during his lifetime. The fact that he was unable to publish any others was a source of puzzlement to his legion of admirers and of frustration to himself. He wrote new fiction constantly and even, on occasion, published snippets of it. But the new novel that everyone anticipated never appeared while he was alive. He did compile two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986), anthologizing his importance as a literary and cultural critic. Few writers have established themselves at the top of their profession with only one book. The southern writer Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is another, who, like Ellison, became a huge literary star with her first and only novel. It is a remarkable and rare achievement. Though Ellison was lionized and celebrated as a new breed of black writer on the basis of Invisible Man, he was also criticized by other African Americans during the Black Arts Movement (mid–1960s to early 1970s). This movement saw the emergence of a number of young, highly political black writers. They were often vehemently committed to leftist or “revolutionary” politics, deeply race conscious, and firm believers in the political role of literature. They believed that literature should be written to transform society. Ellison was detached from the civil rights movement and from the black politics of the period. He was looked upon unfavorably by many of the writers associated with the Black Arts Movement because he did not speak out on the pressing issues of the day. As he said in 1954, “I wasn’t, and am not, concerned with injustice, but with art.” This stance, from which he never wavered, made him seem conservative, stodgy, and out of touch to a younger generation. Ellison managed to survive this period of disapproval and return to a place of esteem in literature. He was

8

Introduction

celebrated by the academic establishment and awarded honorary doctorates from a number of schools. He also taught at several colleges and gave lectures at many more. Ellison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975, a great achievement for any writer, but especially for one who has written only a single novel. Invisible Man became one of the most honored and widely read American novels of the post–World War II era, taught in thousands of colleges, universities, and high schools every year, and read around the world. When Ellison died in 1994, his place in American letters and as an author of international fame was assured.

9

ber of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His ndfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by ling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overe ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide n.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” he Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that bles change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explainthat he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his thbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been raitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He ised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to erstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is aking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the isible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-working ily that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated s philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s her that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the my’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in the n’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em h grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking advice t becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is er quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep quiet n, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 WALDO ELLISON WAS TO LIVE UP TO THE NAME HE WAS GIVEN ns with theRALPH Invisible Man explaining that he is a member of AT BIRTH, HIS PARENTS’ HIGH HOPES FOR HIM ACHIEVED DESPITE SO ard-workingMANY family that its place.” His grandfaODDS AGAINST IT. “stayed in r advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the isible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born s, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with r head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with es, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destrucn, let ’em swoller you till they10 vomit or bust wide open.” It was cking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to the

Chapter 1 Ellison’s Life and Career

Family Background and Childhood Ralph Waldo Ellison was born at 407 East First Street in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1913, to Lewis and Ida Ellison. His father named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was not uncommon for black parents to name their child after a prominent American figure in the hope that he or she would become successful. Emerson was one of Lewis’s favorite writers. After Ellison’s father died, the worn anthology of poetry that Lewis often read was one of Ellison’s most important possessions. Many blacks believed that it was easier to pursue an artistic career in the face of racism than to attempt other professional occupations. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great African-American scholar and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote in an early essay: “We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy.” Without the presence of Negro American style, our [American] jokes, our [American] tall tales, even our [American] sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace (all jazz-shaped) that serve to remind us that the world is ever unexplored, and that while a complete mastery of life is mere illusion, the real secret of the game is to make life swing. —Ralph Ellison, 1970 11

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Ellison himself was very conscious of his name and his father’s ambition for him while growing up. Ellison, however, was sometimes teased by his schoolmates because of his name. He tended to sign his name as either Ralph Ellison or, later, as Ralph W. Ellison. Lewis and Ida (Millsap) Ellison were married in 1909 and moved to Oklahoma City from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta had been the site of a horrible race riot and, in general, the Deep South was not hospitable to African Americans who had any ambitions at all. Oklahoma, though, did not prove to be much better for blacks than the Deep South. Segregation laws were rigidly enforced in the early 1910s, including a law that disenfranchised black voters through literacy tests and a grandfather clause that imposed almost insurmountable restrictions on voter eligibility. This law gave the right to vote only to those voters who could prove that they had relatives who voted

THE

WORLD IN WHICH

ELLISON

GREW UP WAS A SEGREGATED ONE,

FROM WATER FOUNTAINS TO THEATERS TO SCHOOLS.

12

Ellison’s Life and Career

prior to 1866. Of course, no blacks could vote after 1857 because the Supreme Court declared, in the Dred Scott case, that they were not citizens under the Constitution. In any case, most were slaves. Even before this, few blacks, even free African Americans in the North, had been able to vote. Nonetheless, the Ellisons did relatively well. Ida, a native of Georgia, was the first person in her family to learn to read and write. She had refined taste and high ambitions and became active in socialist politics. Lewis worked a variety of jobs in construction and as a teamster before going into business as a successful ice and coal deliverer. The couple welcomed another child, Herbert Maurice, in June of 1916. On June 19, 1916, Lewis, who suffered from poor health and bouts of severe stomach pain, slipped while delivering a heavy block of ice. Young Ralph witnessed the accident, which punctured Lewis’s ulcerated stomach and caused massive bleeding. Lewis never recovered and died in the hospital a month later at the age of thirty-nine. We had said good-by and he had made me a present of the tiny pink and yellow wild flowers that had stood in the vase on the window sill, had put a blue cornflower in my lapel. Then a nurse and two attendants had wheeled in a table and put him on it. He was quite tall and I could see the pain in his face as they moved him. But when they got him covered his feet made little tents of the sheet and he made me a joke about it, just as he had many times before. He smiled then and said good-by once more, and I had watched, holding on to the cold white metal of the hospital bed as they wheeled him away. . . . It was the last time I saw my father alive. —Ralph Ellison, quoted in Jackson, 2002

13

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

The family’s fortunes never recovered from Lewis’s death either. The untimely loss of the male provider would have been a catastrophic blow in any family, but it was even worse for blacks, who had difficulty finding wellpaid jobs. After her husband’s death, Ida had to take work as a domestic servant and accept kindness from family friends. The Ellison family did not have a truly stable residence for many years, moving frequently, sometimes several times in a single year. Because his mother now had to work, Ralph had to take care of his younger brother, a job he hated. Herbert was not as bright or as capable as Ralph and worshipfully looked up to him. Herbert left school when he was nineteen years old but at the time was only in the eighth grade. He also stuttered, so much so that Ralph frequently had to translate what he said to others. Ralph was distressed and embarrassed when other children made fun of Herbert. And what I did get from my mother was an understanding of people. I was very quick-tempered and impatient, and things began to happen when I reached adolescence—and she would just talk about how people acted, what motives were, and why things were sometimes done. —Ralph Ellison, 1974 Ida encouraged her children’s dreams, particularly Ralph’s. During the early Depression years of the 1930s, when Ralph was a poor music student at Tuskegee University, she struggled to send him money, even though she had nothing herself, because she wanted him to fulfill his dream of a great career in music. She also occasionally stood up to the highly segregated conditions in Oklahoma City. After an ordinance was passed prohibiting blacks from visiting the Oklahoma City Zoo unless they were

14

Ellison’s Life and Career

THOUGH ELLISON

WAS ALWAYS INTERESTED IN MUSIC AND ART, HE

TUSKEGEE, A PLACE BETTER KNOWN FOR SCIENCE AFRICAN AMERICANS OF HIS ERA HAD FEW CHOICES. HERE, SCIENTIST GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER CONDUCTS AN EXPERIMENT IN ONE OF THE CLASSROOMS THERE.

ATTENDED COLLEGE AT

AND TECHNOLOGY, BECAUSE

15

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

accompanied by a white person, Ida took her young sons anyway and when stopped by a white attendant she said, “I’m here because I’m a taxpayer, and I thought it was about time that my boys had a look at those animals. And for that I didn’t need any white folks to show me the way.” Ellison later reflected on the event: [Y]ou had learned something about your mother’s courage and were proud that she had broken an unfair law and stood up for her right to do so. For while the white man kept staring until the streetcar arrived she ignored him and answered your brother’s questions about the various animals. Then the car came with its crowd of white parents and children, and when you were entrained and rumbling home past the fine lawns and houses, your mother gave way to a gale of laughter; in which, hesitantly at first, and then with assurance and pride, you joined. Ellison went to kindergarten at the Avery Chapel AME Church, where Ida worked as a cleaning woman. Ellison then attended Frederick Douglass School, which emphasized an academic rather than a vocational curriculum. Ellison’s interest in music started in the second grade under the direction of Zelia N. Breaux, the supervisor of music for Oklahoma City’s African-American schools. Ellison grew close to Breaux and often went to her when he disagreed with his mother. She became the most significant teacher of his childhood, the one who, Ellison wrote, “for years guided me in the path of art.” Breaux played the trumpet, violin, and piano and inspired Ellison and other black children to play music. Breaux discouraged jazz and stressed classical music, as it had more status and she believed it would elevate the taste and aspiration of the black youngsters she taught to play.

16

Ellison’s Life and Career

Like many black musicians, Breaux thought that learning to play classical music would uplift the image of the race. Ida also brought home opera records, so Ellison was exposed to music beyond the spirituals and classical religious hymns played in church. Ellison’s first instrument was the mellophone, which resembles a French horn, but eventually he switched to the trumpet. Ellison read more widely as a child and teenager than most of his friends. He began to read a variety of books and magazines, many of which his mother brought home from her various domestic jobs. He read Vanity Fair and Literary Digest as well as westerns, mysteries, fairy tales, and the standard pulp fiction that would appeal to a boy. Despite being poor and black with limited access to culture because of segregation, Ellison was familiar with a wider variety of writing and music than most boys his age. Ellison wrote many years later, “Oklahoma had no tradition of slavery, and while it was segregated, relationships between the races were more fluid and thus more human than in the old slave states. . . . I recognized limitations, yes; but I thought these limitations were unjust and I felt no innate sense of inferiority which would keep me from getting those things I desired out of life.” This distinction between Oklahoma and the Deep South might account for Ellison’s high aspirations as a musician and, later, as a writer. One difference was that while he was growing up Ellison had more interaction with whites than he probably would have had if he lived in the Deep South. Whites owned the grocery stores he patronized and lived in nearby houses. He worked at Lewisohn’s Clothing Store, owned by a Jewish family, and he was so taken by its owner, Milt Lewisohn, that he even imitated the way Lewisohn walked. Around 1921 or 1922, Ellison’s family lived in a white neighborhood and he became friends with Henry “Hoolie” Davis, the son of an Episcopalian minister.

17

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Hoolie’s mother encouraged the friendship. The two boys particularly liked building radio sets. (Ellison enjoyed tinkering and maintained a love of gadgets and building things all his life.) As biographer Lawrence Jackson wrote: “Now [Ellison] didn’t have to imagine what whites were like to make comparison to himself and his black friends. Ralph cherished the rewarding experience with the white Davis family because it offset the poverty of his own life, which had begun to shame him.” Ellison also encountered whites through his trumpet lessons with Ludwig Hebestreit, a renowned music teacher who taught at the white Classen High School. Unable to afford the lessons, Ellison mowed Hebestreit’s lawn in exchange for instruction. This work relationship also made it more acceptable for Ellison to be in the neighborhood and in Hebestreit’s home. To be sure, these contacts with white middle-class society were important, but it was Ellison’s exposure to black culture that really informed his experience as a boy and a teen. What shaped Ellison’s sense of art in his childhood more than anything else was jazz. In the 1920s, when Ellison was a teenager, jazz was a new genre of music. Though jazz was largely invented by blacks, young white musicians quickly latched on to it, such as those in the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which made the first jazz record in 1917. Jazz in the 1920s was popular among young people as dance music. A highly rhythmic art with improvised breaks or solos, it captivated younger listeners. Older people, however, tended not to like it; many, both black and white, thought it was loud, poorly played, and indecent, and they associated it with nightclubs. Since it was also generally played in the African-American parts of town, many white critics of the music thought it was “Africanizing” American cultural life and destroying white American values and taste. Some Americans didn’t like jazz because of the connections between jazz and

18

Ellison’s Life and Career

urban centers. As the population shifted from rural to urban life, some Americans feared the disruptive, immoral, and isolating nature of cities, and the rebellious sounds that accompanied urban nightlife. The nontraditional free-form character of jazz music was inextricably associated with America’s burgeoning cities. The fact that jazz turned into a national craze at a time when recordings, rather than sheet music, became the major way that the public consumed music also added to its controversial nature. Since people could now easily buy and listen to music, jazz spread faster than any other music had before and, for the first time, music lovers were able to hear great jazz artists perform on records when they could not attend a live performance. Having records that could be played back repeatedly also enabled musicians to learn from and imitate the greats. I had been caught actively between two [styles of music]: that of the Negro folk music, both sacred and profane, slave song and jazz, and that of Western classical music. It was most confusing: the folk tradition demanded that I play what I heard and felt around me, while those who were seeking to teach the classical tradition in the schools insisted that I play strictly according to the book and express that which I was supposed to feel. This sometimes led to heated clashes of wills. —Ralph Ellison, 1955 Ellison had ample opportunities to hear this music and even to play it occasionally as a teenager. He grew especially fond of jazz while living in a black section of Oklahoma City called Deep Second. He knew other teen jazz players, including guitarist Charlie Christian and singer Jimmy Rushing. Walter Page’s Blue Devils was one

19

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

THE OKLAHOMA CITY BLUE DEVILS

WERE IMPORTANT TO

GROWING KNOWLEDGE OF JAZZ.

20

ELLISON’S

Ellison’s Life and Career

JIMMY RUSHING (LEFT) AND COUNT BASIE OFTEN PERFORMED TOGETHER.

of Oklahoma City’s most impressive jazz bands, although it would make its name in Kansas City where it eventually became the nucleus of the Count Basie orchestra in the mid–1930s. Because of its ties to Oklahoma, the Basie band was always close to Ellison’s heart. Ellison also heard other black “territory” bands come through Oklahoma City and witnessed jam sessions where the musicians honed their craft. Jazz seeped into black urban life, and Ellison heard jazz everywhere as a youth. “Jazz was so much a part of our total way of life that it got not only into our attempts at playing classical music but into forms of activities usually not associated with it: into marching and into football games . . .” In short, jazz was a cultural expression that absorbed everything into its 21

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

aesthetic, nearly a culture in and of itself—much like hiphop music today. Years later Ellison looked back on his exposure to jazz bands as a teen: “Now, I had learned from the jazz musicians I had known as a boy in Oklahoma City something of the discipline and devotion to his art required of the artist. . . . These jazzmen, many of them now world-famous, lived for and with music intensely. Their driving motivation was neither money nor fame, but the will to achieve the most eloquent expression of idea-emotions through the technical mastery of their instruments (which, incidentally, some of them wore as a priest wears the cross) and the give and take, the subtle rhythmical shaping and blending of idea, tone, and imagination demanded of group improvisation.” Why can’t writers be as concerned with quality as jazz musicians? —Ralph Ellison, 1977 It is clear that Ellison learned from jazz what art is and how to be an artist. He never spoke about black writers with anything like the admiration and pride with which he spoke of the black jazz musicians of his generation. It is also clear that more than the music attracted him. These black musicians were frequently the most professional men a young black boy was likely to find: better dressed than anyone else, better trained at their craft (with the possible exceptions of Negro League baseball players and black boxers), far more traveled and sophisticated than the average black person, and far more likely to have money. Furthermore, jazz musicians garnered more praise and respect from whites than any other black professionals. Music was the art that gave Ellison a sense of tradition as a black artist. By the time he finished high school in 1931, having achieved first trumpet in the school orchestra, Ellison

22

Ellison’s Life and Career

wanted to pursue a career in music as a trumpeter, and, ultimately, as a composer. He had absorbed the belief that black folk music and themes needed to be transformed into “serious” music for trained musicians. But he had little money, indifferent grades, and an unremarkable talent. There was little to recommend him to anyone. He learned about a music program at Tuskegee University, traditionally an agricultural and vocational school, that had been launched under noted black composer William Dawson, who represented the type of musician Ellison aspired to be. Ellison was admitted and even given a small, inadequate scholarship. Since he could not afford a ticket, Ellison illegally hitched rides on freight trains—men caught doing so were often beaten by railroad guards— and Ellison arrived at Tuskegee on June 24, 1933, with a bandaged and bloody head, which he never explained to anyone. He never lived in Oklahoma City again. He was to spend the next three years of his life in the Deep South attending classes at Tuskegee. He disliked both the south and college life. Indeed, during the 1920s, several black colleges experienced student revolts against the rigid campus life, more rigid than the life on white college campuses. Ellison struggled during the three years he was an undergraduate music student at Tuskegee. He did not have enough money to finance his education, so he was constantly trying to find ways to make money and he wrote home frequently to ask his mother to help. In one letter he wrote: “I really don’t see how I am going to make it because I didn’t understand it would cost that much when I started.” In another letter, he wrote: “I have no razor, no blades, no soap, no hair cut, no toothpaste, no anything. I wish you would send as many of these . . . as soon as possible.” Ellison, however, was determined to work hard and succeed. At college he began his musical apprenticeship, long years in what, for him, would be the wrong trade.

23

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Tuskegee Come to think of it our writing novels must surely be an upset to somebody’s calculations. Tuskegee certainly wasn’t intended for that. —Ralph Ellison to Albert Murray, 1951 Biographer Lawrence Jackson writes that Ellison had come to Tuskegee “with the ambitious dream of emulating Wagner and writing a symphony by the age of twenty-six, combining his Oklahoma heritage of jazz and the classics.” However, he did not get along with William Dawson, choirmaster and head of Tuskegee’s Music School. Dawson, a Tuskegee alumnus and a former trombonist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was one of the noted black composers of his era. His Negro Folk Symphony was the first symphony by an African American to be played by a major orchestra. Indeed, Dawson was exactly what Ellison aspired to be: a serious composer who was able to make creative use of black folk material. But Ellison felt that Dawson was too hard on him, and Dawson never seemed to have great confidence in Ellison’s musical abilities. On the other hand, he could merely have been testing the young student to see how badly he wanted a career in music. Such a career entails a great deal of sacrifice and perhaps Dawson was trying to see if Ellison had the discipline and maturity to truly pursue this craft. Ellison became friends with piano teacher Hazel Harrison and received encouragement from the band director, Frank Drye, under whose tutelage he performed well. Aside from music, Ellison also studied sculpture and briefly thought about pursuing it as a career. However, the most influential of all of Ellison’s teachers at Tuskegee was probably Morteza Sprague, to whom Ellison dedicated Shadow and Act. Sprague was a graduate 24

Ellison’s Life and Career

of the predominantly white Hamilton College in New York and held a master’s degree from the prestigious black Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was the chair of the English department at Tuskegee and taught courses on the English novel. Sprague felt that students should learn how to interpret, criticize, and analyze literature. He was young (only four years older than Ellison), handsome, and friendly, and had an open attitude that made him a popular teacher. Ellison recalled: “He was an honest teacher, for when I went to him about Eliot and such people, he told me he hadn’t given much attention to them and that they weren’t taught at Tuskegee. But he told me what to do about it: the places to find discussions and criticism.” Ellison took a freshman composition class with Sprague, who stressed the mechanics of writing; Ellison found the class quite demanding. In his junior year he took Sprague’s course on the English novel, learning about novelists like Henry Fielding, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope. The novels that had the biggest impact on Ellison emotionally and intellectually were Emily Bront¨e’s Wuthering Heights and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. He was also deeply affected by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel he encountered outside of Sprague’s class. By his junior year, Ellison had become a proficient literature student, doing far better in English than in his music courses. His association with Sprague, and the encouragement he received, led Ellison to study literature seriously, although he was still committed to a career in music. It is commonly thought that Woodridge, the passionate English professor in Invisible Man, is a caricature inspired by Sprague. While the fictional Woodridge teaches modernist Irish literature to his class, the actual Sprague, did not, since modern literature was not studied at Tuskegee. Ellison also uses Woodridge as a mouthpiece for his own strong 25

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

beliefs in individuality. Not surprisingly, Woodridge is presented in a very positive light. “I could see him vividly, half-drunk on words and full of contempt and exaltation, pacing before the blackboard chalked with quotations from Joyce and Yeats and Sean O’Casey; thin, nervous, neat, pacing as though he walked a high wire of meaning upon which no one of us would ever dare venture. I could hear him: ‘Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record. . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn’t exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!’” Ellison enjoyed his literature classes, but he hated his sociology classes, which taught about racial traits and the racial characteristics of blacks, usually in a patronizing way. Many sociologists, including many black ones, believed that African Americans were artistic, submissive, forgiving, and humble by nature. Ellison did not believe in racial traits and was particularly annoyed that his black sociology professors accepted these notions without challenge. He considered sociology to be “dogmatic and arrogant . . . quick to flaunt its vaunted empiricism as Truth.” Ellison remained critical of the sociology of race his entire adult life; his ideas about cross-cultural racial exchange and ethnic fluidity, developed during his undergraduate days, remained intact. His grades reflected his dislike of the subject.

26

Ellison’s Life and Career

He heard a spellbinding lecture about “The Founder,” Booker T. Washington, on Founder’s Day in 1936, delivered by Emmett J. Scott of Howard University, who had been second-in-command when Washington was president of Tuskegee. Despite Scott’s rhetorical power, Ellison felt that the Tuskegee he was experiencing had little relation to the mythic story of Washington that Scott told. This inconsistency between the legend and the reality depressed Ellison and made him even more dissatisfied with Tuskegee. Ellison would later rework this lecture in Invisible Man as Homer Barbee’s sermon. Ellison was never able to reconcile himself to Tuskegee. As someone with an artistic bent, he felt out of place among people studying agriculture or vocational fields. His money struggles finally forced him to leave the school in 1936, at the end of his junior year. He decided to go to New York to earn money so that he could return to school and complete his degree. Encouraged by his art instructor, Eva Hamlin, with whom he took painting and sculpting courses, Ellison hoped to study sculpture with black sculptor Augusta Savage. However, when he returned to Tuskegee, close to two decades later, it was as a celebrated novelist.

The New York Years I came up [to New York] during my junior year hoping to work and learn a little about sculpture. And although I did study a bit, I didn’t get the job through which I hoped to earn enough money for my school expenses, so I remained in New York, where I soon realized that although I had a certain facility with three-dimensional form I wasn’t really interested in sculpture. So after a while I blundered into writing. —Ralph Ellison, 1961 27

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison arrived in New York on July 5, 1936, and immediately found a room at the YMCA on West 135th Street in Harlem, one of the largest black urban communities in the United States. He was deeply impressed with some aspects of Harlem—the sheer size and the number of people, the range of churches, the Apollo Theater, and the many businesses—and distressed by others—overcrowding, poverty, crime, mental illness, disease, and racial inequality. Ellison was particularly eager to hear music and there was a great deal of classical music and jazz played in Harlem, in addition to the musicals on and off Broadway. On his first day in Harlem, he saw followers of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey standing on street corners delivering militant political speeches, an image he later used in Invisible Man to describe the first encounter his protagonist had with Ras the Exhorter. Certainly, he had never heard blacks speak this way in public in either Oklahoma City or at Tuskegee. Harlem provided a richer, more diverse view of black communal life. Unfortunately for Ellison, the letters of introduction that William Dawson wrote for him before he left Tuskegee were virtually useless. Ellison used this experience in Invisible Man with the letters of introduction that the college president, Bledsoe, gives to the protagonist when the latter is forced to leave the school. It is doubtful that Dawson tried to sabotage Ellison deliberately. Trying to find a position in the musical world was difficult during the Great Depression, especially for a musician with so little experience and talent. Ellison’s job search was not very successful. Ellison tried some manual labor, including a job in the kitchen of the Harlem Y, but stayed at these jobs for only brief periods. He may have feared that he might become trapped in a menial job that would not fulfill his artistic ambitions. In fact, during his adult life, Ellison seldom held typical 9-to-5 jobs.

28

Ellison’s Life and Career

MARCUS GARVEY, THE BLACK NATIONALIST LEADER WHOSE BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT HAD A SIGNIFICANT FOLLOWING AT ONE TIME, CUT QUITE A COLORFUL FIGURE.

29

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

He did not wind up studying sculpture with Augusta Savage. Apparently, they did not get along because of her somewhat prickly personality. But he did begin studying with African-American sculptor Richmond Barthé. It was through Barthé that Ellison was introduced to the white intellectuals and artists in Greenwich Village. Barthé also helped Ellison get a job with psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan as a file clerk and receptionist, a position that lasted only from August 17 until December 31, 1936. While working for Sullivan, he read the files of some of the patients; their stories inspired some of the dream sequences in Invisible Man. Ellison was more successful entering the New York literary world. On his second day in Harlem, Ellison met Howard University English professor Alain Locke, who had lectured a few months earlier at Tuskegee. He also was befriended by Langston Hughes, the black poet, playwright, and journalist. Ellison impressed Hughes very much with his knowledge of literature and literary criticism. Hughes offered him several books, including some on Marxism, Ellison’s first introduction to the subject. Through his friendship with Hughes, Ellison began to circulate among leftist and Communist intellectual circles, learning about left-wing politics and reading radical literature. In addition to Hughes, Louise Thompson, a member of the Communist Party, exposed Ellison to radical leftist politics and introduced Ellison to other Party members. She was good-looking, intellectual, serious about politics, and had a sharp tongue. Scholar Lawrence Jackson observed that Thompson had “feet firmly planted in both the Communist Party and the black bourgeoisie.” She offered Ellison knowledge about Harlem as well as further entry into the world of leftist politics. Ellison was impressed by André Malraux’s famous novel, Man’s Fate (1933), which dealt with the Communist revolt in China in 1927. This work was hugely influential for Ellison and a generation of Western writers. Indeed, 30

Ellison’s Life and Career

RICHARD WRIGHT (RIGHT)

COUNT BASIE ARE SHOWN AT A BOTH OF THESE MEN HAD A STRONG ELLISON’S DEVELOPMENT. AND

RECORDING SESSION TOGETHER. INFLUENCE ON

31

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Ellison would praise the French novelist for the rest of his life. When Malraux became Minster of Cultural Affairs in France he returned the admiration, bestowing the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et Lettres upon Ellison in 1970. Without question, the most important person Ellison met in New York was aspiring writer Richard Wright. Hughes arranged a meeting between twenty-four-year-old Ellison and twenty-eight-year-old Wright on May 31, 1937. The two men shared similar characteristics; both were intellectual, literary, and ambitious. Wright, however, was more confident, more certain that he wanted to write fiction. Ellison was impressed with Wright’s knowledge of literature, his discipline, and his devotion to his craft. Wright worked at his writing with a dedication and purpose that indicated a greater literary ambition than Hughes had. Wright wanted to be a great writer, a major writer. “In this country there were good Negro writers before Wright arrived on the scene . . . but it seems to me that Richard Wright wanted more and dared more,” wrote Ellison in 1971. Wright was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. He described his difficult childhood and adolescence in his famous autobiography, Black Boy, published in 1945. Wright’s exposure to black life was different than Ellison’s. His attitude toward black folk culture and folkways was more ambivalent than Ellison’s and his appreciation of black music far more limited. His encounters with whites were frequently humiliating and sometimes violent. Despite this, Wright refused to accept the system of racial submission. He wanted to be a writer, an ambition that his family did not understand and the whites around him scorned as ridiculous, if not dangerous. Wright was an outsider in his southern world, a position that Ellison never had to accept during his youth in Oklahoma City. Furthermore, Ellison’s ambitions were understood and nurtured during his youth.

32

Ellison’s Life and Career

Ellison commented on the difference between Oklahoma City and the Deep South in an interview: “You had segregation in Oklahoma City. But you had no tradition of slavery. So those old patterns were not imposed as successfully as they might have been. There was never a time that we didn’t have white friends. The neighborhood was mixed.” What were the ways in which other Negroes confronted their destiny? In the south of Wright’s childhood there were three general ways: They could accept the role created for them by the whites and perpetually resolve the resulting conflicts through the hope and emotional cartharsis of Negro religion; they could repress their dislike of Jim Crow social relations while striving for a middle way of respectability, becoming—consciously or unconsciously—the accomplices of the whites in oppressing their brothers; or they could reject the situation, adopt a criminal attitude, and carry on an unceasing psychological scrimmage with the whites, which often flared forth into physical violence. Wright’s attitude was nearest the last. —Ralph Ellison, 1945

When he met Ellison, Wright had just been transferred from Chicago to New York to head the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper. He also became co-editor of New Challenge, a revival of Challenge,

33

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

a magazine edited by African-American novelist Dorothy West. He hoped the magazine would become a major vehicle for black artistic and intellectual expression. In the summer of 1937, Wright gave Ellison his first professional writing job—a review of African-American novelist Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds. Its publication in New Challenge was momentous for Ellison, who thereafter devoted himself to becoming a writer. Wright encouraged him, asking him next to write a short story for the magazine. By September 1937, Ellison submitted his first piece of fiction, “Hymie’s Bull,” which was accepted for the second issue of New Challenge. The story, based on Ellison’s journey to Tuskegee, was about the men who illegally ride trains and the brutal humanity of the world of hoboes. Unfortunately, the New Challenge did not publish a second issue; “Hymie’s Bull” was eventually published posthumously. Nonetheless, Ellison had found his calling as a professional writer.

The Writing Life In October 1937 Ellison traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio, after learning that his mother had contracted tuberculosis as a result of a misdiagnosis of her injury from a fall. She was so sick she did not recognize him. Ellison’s mother died on October 16. Ellison stayed in Dayton with his brother to settle his mother’s affairs. While in Ohio Ellison learned to hunt and also wrote fiction: “At night I practiced writing and studied Joyce, Dostoievski [sic], Stein, and Hemingway. Especially Hemingway: I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story.” Ellison was also involved in Communist Party activities while in Dayton, but there was little work to do, as Communism had not taken root in that part of the Midwest. By the time Ellison returned to New York on March 2, 1938, he had partially finished a draft of a novel to be

34

Ellison’s Life and Career

entitled Slick, had finished a novella called Tillman and Tackhead, and had written four short stories. Those stories were “Last Day,” a hunting story that was a direct copy of a Hemingway tale; “Goodnight, Irene,” about a black man whose wife has an affair with a white man; “The Black Ball,” about union organizing and blacks overcoming their distrust of whites; and “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” another Hemingway-influenced story about a black train worker. Ellison was determined, however, to publish a novel.

Publication and Fame Ellison spent the summer of 1945 with his friends John and Amelie Bates on their farm in Vermont. It was during this stay that he began writing the novel that would become Invisible Man. “I am an invisible man,” he wrote on his notepad. This became the first sentence of the published book. The previous year Ellison had signed a contract with Reynal and Hitchcock to write a novel and he had been floundering. Though Invisible Man would take six years to complete, it was a promising start after two failed ideas. He had originally set out to write about a black pilot imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp who, because he possessed the highest rank, became the spokesman for his fellow prisoners. He had written a short story entitled “Flying Home” that was published in Cross Section in 1944 about a black pilot who crash-lands in a black farmer’s field. Clearly, writing a fictional work about a black pilot and the military was much on his mind, probably because of the war. In 1943 Ellison joined the Merchant Marine as a cook and traveled abroad—to Wales—for the first time. He got sick while in Wales and was declared ineligible for the draft, but was recalled briefly by the Merchant Marine in 1945. However, he lacked sufficient knowledge of the military and of life in a

35

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

POW camp to make such a novel believable. He started another novel that was set in a southern college. Neither of these novels was ever finished. What happened to Ellison between 1938, when he returned to New York from Dayton, and his July 1945 trip to Vermont when he began to work on Invisible Man? Among other things, Ellison married. His marriage to actress/dancer Rose Poindexter lasted from 1938 to 1945. On August 28, 1946, he married Fanny McConnell, whose financial and emotional support enabled Ellison to become a full-time writer and finish Invisible Man. Ellison gave his last public trumpet performance in March 1938, then closed the door on any lingering thoughts of a career in music. He watched the success of Wright’s 1938 publication of Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of short stories that won critical acclaim. Wright followed this up with his novel Native Son in 1940, a commercial and critical success that made him the most successful and famous black writer in American literary history at that time. Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, was published in 1945 and was also successful. In 1944, Wright wrote “I Tried to be a Communist” for the Atlantic Monthly, publicly breaking with the Communists. Unlike many other intellectuals and writers who left the Party because they hated Stalin’s brutal purges, Wright left because he did not think the Party was sufficiently militant on the matter of the “Negro Question”—black civil rights. Both he and Ellison actually supported Stalin. Ellison left the Party shortly after Wright did, but he never wrote a formal denunciatory essay. Ellison supported Wright publicly and defended him against critics in the Communist Party and black readers who disagreed with his themes for ideological or political reasons. Indeed, one of the most important essays of Ellison’s career was “Richard Wright’s Blues,” published 36

Ellison’s Life and Career

in The Antioch Review in 1945. In this favorable and perceptive review of Black Boy, Ellison formulated his famous definition of the blues. During these years he developed important friendships with literary critic and writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, literary critic Kenneth Burke, and art patron Ida Espen Guggenheimer, to whom he dedicated Invisible Man. Most importantly, Ellison honed his craft as a writer. He worked for the New York Writers’ Project. He also wrote numerous reviews that appeared not only in Communist magazines but frequently in literary journals. In 1941 he became the managing editor of The Negro Quarterly and, although the magazine only lasted two years, Ellison learned much about the art and technique of writing by editing the works of others. He also wrote fiction that was published in magazines, including the “The Birthmark” and “Mister Toussan’” in New Masses, “Slick Gonna Learn” in Direction, and “That I Had Wings” in Common Ground. Ellison continued writing and established a strong reputation as a talented literary reviewer and critic. By 1945 a major publishing house, recognizing his promise as a fiction writer, was willing to give him a respectable advance to write a novel. This was bolstered by the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1945. It took Ellison six years to write Invisible Man. He had little experience writing a novel and found it particularly difficult to formulate a coherent plot. Furthermore, fiction did not come as easily to him as composing essays and book reviews. Ellison was determined to write the great American novel. He aspired “to creat[e] a novel so rich in its symbolic, allegorical, psychological, social, and historical insight that it would be acclaimed as a masterpiece,” biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote. He wanted the complexity of African-American life to be on par with complexity of Western culture itself, black traditions to be intertwined with Western tradition. 37

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

In 1947, the first chapter of Invisible Man, the nowfamous battle royal scene, was published in Horizon magazine. Rumors had circulated about the book and the publication of this sample generated great anticipation in the literary world. The Prologue section of the novel was published in Partisan Review in 1952, again to much acclaim. Invisible Man was published on April 14, 1952, by Random House, which bought Ellison’s contract from Reynal and Hitchcock. It was not a runaway best seller, but six thousand copies had been sold by the end of the month. It was an impressive start for a book by a black author. The reviews were very favorable. Indeed, most reviewers felt it was a real breakthrough in AfricanAmerican writing because it was not a protest novel or a novel simply concerned with race. The invisible man will move upward through Negro life, coming into contact with its various forms and personality types; will operate in the Negro middle class, in the left-wing movement and descend again into the disorganized atmosphere of the Harlem underworld. He will move upward in society through opportunism and submissiveness. Psychologically he is a traitor, to himself, to his people and to democracy and his treachery lies in his submissiveness and opportunism. —Ralph Ellison, circa 1946 Invisible Man addresses the major stages in AfricanAmerican history, particularly as related to the struggle for recognition by white America. Although set in the mid–twentieth century, the novel covers slavery, Reconstruction, the migration from south to north, and black involvement in the social, cultural, and political movements of American history. Although Invisible Man can be

38

Ellison’s Life and Career

read as the semiautobiographical path of one man’s life, it is, in fact, a significant commentary on American life, which accounts for its broad appeal. Though very clearly about black life, it also tells universal truths about how it feels to be in the world—and not be seen. The writing style is not the social realist, naturalist approach used by Richard Wright. Ellison wrote the novel with a modernist style; there are abstract interior monologues and descriptions, highly symbolic images and allusions, and hallucinatory passages. Though challenging at times, Invisible Man is generally accessible to most readers. Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction on January 27, 1953, beating out Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a remarkable achievement. Ellison was the first black writer to win the prestigious award, and it shot Ellison into literary stardom on the basis of one book. He returned to Tuskegee University on June 22, 1953, as a celebrated writer. The following week he visited Oklahoma City, his boyhood home, as a conquering hero. Although he was to receive accolades and honors for the rest of his life, Ellison’s life after the novel’s publication was a study in frustration. He was never able to complete another novel and he was not satisfied with being a one-book author. In a 1955 roundtable that included Ellison and several other noted authors, Hiram Haydn expressed it clearly: “I know that one test . . . of a really first-rate novelist, I should say, as against the writer of a first-rate novel, is that he should produce more than one first-rate novel.” It was not for lack of trying that Ellison did not succeed with a second novel. In 1955 he won the Prix de Rome fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and spent two years in Rome. He published some important essays during this period, including “Living with Music” in High Fidelity and “Society, Morality, and the Novel” in an anthology. He also published some short 39

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

fiction: “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” probably his most famous story about two young male characters, Buster and Riley, and “Did You Ever Dream Lucky?” in New World Writing. But no novel. By the time he accepted an appointment at Bard College, six years had passed since the publication of Invisible Man and he felt great pressure to produce another novel of the same caliber. His own expectations and those of others were perhaps unrealistic. By 1960, the year Wright died in Paris, Invisible Man was more highly regarded by literary critics than any of Wright’s fiction. In 1965 Invisible Man was named Best American Novel of the post–World War II era in a poll of leading American literary critics. Ellison enjoyed several well-paying appointments at prestigious colleges after the publication of Invisible Man: a one-year appointment at the University of Chicago in 1961, a two-year appointment at Yale (1962–1964), a seven-year appointment at Rutgers University (1962– 1969), and a ten-year appointment at New York University (1970–1980). He received honorary degrees from Tuskegee University, Rutgers University, Williams College, Adelphi and Long Island universities, the College of William and Mary, Harvard University, Wake Forest College, Bard College, and Wesleyan University. These academic honors and appointments meant a great deal to him. He was a good teacher, but not a gifted one, and sometimes the jobs amounted to nothing more than sinecures. These institutions were purchasing his name, his race, and his reputation. During these years, he published a steady stream of essays, some highly distinguished, including his pieces on jazz that have become the cornerstone of the jazz studies field. Most were collected for his two published volumes of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). He also published portions of the novel he was writing—such as “Juneteenth” in 1965, “Cadillac

40

Ellison’s Life and Career

RALPH ELLISON, LIKE THE INVISIBLE MAN, ADOPTED NEW YORK CITY HERE HE SITS ON A PARK BENCH ENJOYING THE CITY HE LOVED.

AS HIS HOME.

41

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Flambe” in 1973, and “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator” in 1977—but never completed the book. It is unclear if he was simply unable to let go of the manuscript he was working on or if he could not craft a coherent story out of the massive amount that he had written over the years. A fire at his summer home in Massachusetts in 1967 is believed to have destroyed a significant part of the novel he was working on, although it is not known how much was destroyed or if the loss seriously hampered his work. To think that a writer must think about his Negroness is to fall into a trap. —Ralph Ellison, 1966 Although he received honors and recognition, Ellison suffered a great deal of recrimination from younger black writers and intellectuals during the 1960s and early 1970s. Young blacks thought he was at best old-fashioned and at worst an Uncle Tom—a black person who catered to white people. Some of their reasons were superficial, like the fact that Ellison preferred to use the word negro and younger African Americans preferred black. But there were also more substantial differences. The Black Arts Movement was popular at that time, led by poet, playwright, and essayist LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka. Baraka and the writers associated with this movement believed: that black people in America were African and not American, ● that black artists had to produce art expressly for black people, ● that the art had to be explicitly political and aimed toward strengthening the goals of the black liberation struggle. ●

42

Ellison’s Life and Career

THE

PUBLICATION OF THE LONG-AWAITED JUNETEENTH, FIVE YEARS

AFTER TION.

ELLISON’S DEATH, WAS MET WITH A DECIDEDLY MIXED RECEPELLISON’S REPUTATION CONTINUES TO REST ON INVISIBLE MAN.

43

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Ellison did not share these views. Although he collected African art, he had little interest in the idea of blacks in America having any important cultural or psychological link with Africans. He was opposed to art serving the aims of a political movement, although he did not deny that art possessed a political dimension. He had

THIS 2003 SCULPTURE BY ELIZABETH CATLETT, ERECTED IN RIVERSIDE PARK, NEW YORK CITY, CONSISTS OF A BRONZE MONOLITH THROUGH WHICH THE SILHOUETTE OF A STRIDING MAN HAS BEEN CUT. IT’S A REFERENCE TO ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN—AND A TRIBUTE TO THE AUTHOR.

44

Ellison’s Life and Career

no involvement with the civil rights movement and he supported Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, a position that put him at odds not only with young blacks but with many of his white liberal literary colleagues. Another reason Ellison was disliked by younger black writers was because he refused to serve as a mentor to them. He seldom met with any of them, read their work, or offered any assistance in helping them get published. The younger writers felt he was not living up to his position as an elder statesman. Ellison’s explanation was that he was busy with his own work. Ellison survived this period of disapproval and lived to see his work return to favor. With his wife, Fanny, by his side and with Bach violin music in the background, Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, at the age of eighty-one. By the time of his death, his reputation as one of the great American writers of the twentieth century was assured. English professor and critic John Callahan’s favorable review of Invisible Man led to a meeting with Ellison in 1977 that developed into a close friendship. Callahan was named Ellison’s literary executor and has been responsible for all of Ellison’s posthumous publications, including the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, which appeared in 1995, and Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), a collection of Ellison’s works from the 1940s and 1950s. His most controversial undertaking was the editing of Ellison’s surviving fiction manuscripts to produce Juneteenth, Ellison’s second novel, in 1999. The book was financially successful but critical reception was mixed.

45

hapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” is grandfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by elling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor ll my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his on, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to vercome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to eath and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something f “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to nderstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it s speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the nvisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-workng family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advoated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible an’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a py in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your ead in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, ndermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, et ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was hocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to the nvisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. He as advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that nables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man xplaining that he is a member of a hard-working family that stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosphy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father hat he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the nemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in he lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, underine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em woller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking dvice that becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, s he is never understand it., AND HeWELL was advised to JAZZ quite TRUMPETERable LOUIS Ato RMSTRONG WAS POPULAR WITH KNOWN TO , BOTH BLACK AND WHITE AUDIENCES . A RMSTRONG IS ALSO eep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables THE ONLY JAZZ MUSICIAN MENTIONED BY NAME IN INVISIBLE MAN. hange. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining hat he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his eathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” e advised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I 46 ant you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, gree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till

Chapter 2 The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance Materially, psychologically, and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, our assertions and our actions. —Ralph Ellison, 1970 Ralph Ellison’s childhood and adolescence coincided with the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance (also called the New Negro Renaissance). Although Oklahoma City was far from the heart of this movement in Harlem, New York, Ellison and young blacks in other cities felt the effects, particularly in the creation and dissemination of jazz. Black music, packaged and sold by white record companies in black neighborhoods as race records, had become a commercial and artistic force in America. Black

47

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

vocalists, including Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, and Josephine Baker, became famous. The most famous of the jazz soloists of the 1920s and 1930s was trumpeter Louis Armstrong from New Orleans. Armstrong is the only jazz musician mentioned by name in Invisible Man. For Ellison jazz would always be the most worthwhile and impressive product of the New Negro artistic movement. Young African-American writers who emerged at the time included novelist and short-story writer Rudolph Fisher (1897–1934), novelist Wallace Thurman (1902– 1934), poet and novelist Countee Cullen (1903–1946), poet and playwright Langston Hughes (1902–1967), and novelists Jean Toomer (1894–1967), Jessie Fauset (1882– 1961), and Claude McKay (1889–1948). All of these writers published several books and worked in different genres. From them, Ellison realized that it was possible for a black person to make a living as a professional writer. Several of these writers had crossover appeal, showing Ellison that it was possible to write a book with black characters that would appeal to both black and white readers. Ellison also learned from these authors about the debate among blacks concerning what sort of literature would best serve them: uplifting literature that showed the better elements of the race—lawyers, doctors, and teachers—or realist literature about black life as it is lived by the downtrodden. Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, about life among lower-class blacks, was both vehemently denounced and passionately defended by readers and critics. There was a concerted effort to publish work by black writers, led by people such as James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke. There were also black magazines—Opportunity, The Crisis, The Messenger—and black newspapers that published creative writing. Some white publications occasionally published black writers, and there were white

48

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

LANGSTON HUGHES WAS A MENTOR AMERICAN WRITERS AND ARTISTS.

TO MANY RISING

49

AFRICAN-

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

BROUGHT

AFRICAN-AMERICAN

ARTS TO

THE FOREFRONT AND WAS ALSO THE BEGINNING OF A STRONG PUSH FOR EQUAL RIGHTS.

50

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

patrons who supported black writers. This certainly became clear to Ellison by the time he reached New York and associated himself with Hughes, Wright, and other black writers. Perhaps the most important change during the Harlem Renaissance was in the political attitudes of blacks, especially those living in big cities and in areas outside the south. First, there was the rise of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey (1887–1940) was born in Jamaica and encouraged black Americans to return to Africa and reclaim it from European imperialism. He was opposed to racial integration, believed in the superiority of blacks, and thought blacks should have their own values, politics, and philosophy. Garvey was eventually convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to five years in federal prison. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927, where he died. Ellison maintained that his character Ras the Exhorter was not supposed to be Marcus Garvey. Nevertheless, the similarities between the character and Garvey are undeniable. “No conscious reference to Garvey is intended,” he said in 1954. But he remarked in 1960 that “[as] a small boy, I remember the Garvey movement. We had some enthusiasts out there in Oklahoma. People wanted to go to Africa.” There were other writers who attained positions as prominent black leaders of the period. Socialist A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), who became the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an important black union, began publishing a magazine called The Messenger with Chandler Owen (1889–1967) in 1917. Du Bois was a major voice in the NAACP as the editor of The Crisis. Jamaican writer Claude McKay was among the first blacks to visit the Soviet Union when he attended the Third International in Moscow in 1922; the Russian Revolution had made Communism attractive to many 51

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

intellectuals, both black and white. Socialism, Communism, and ethnic and racial nationalism, intensely current and controversial ideas of the time, deeply affected black thinking. All of these ideas are dramatized and examined in Invisible Man.

The Beginnings of Change The Great Depression of the 1930s ended the Harlem Renaissance, but the decade gave rise to the American Communist movement, which attracted a number of black intellectuals and creative artists, including Ralph Ellison. But by the early 1950s, when Invisible Man was published, the social, political, and economic situation for African Americans was notably different, signaling an even more drastic change in attitudes throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1940s African Americans began earning higher salaries, a trend that would continue for the next thirty years and result in more blacks living above the poverty line. As blacks became relatively more affluent, they became less tolerant of segregation and eager to overcome their subordinate status. AfricanAmerican participation in World War II made them press harder for their full rights as American citizens. In 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington, with thousands of blacks descending upon the segregated city. Fearing an outbreak of racial violence if such a march occurred, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order on June 25, 1941, demanding an end to hiring discrimination in the defense industry and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Blacks had begun to flex their political muscle. In 1947 Jackie Robinson opened the season with the Brooklyn Dodgers and became the first African American to play for a major league team. In 1948 President Harry

52

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN WERE THE FIRST BLACK MILITARY AIRMEN. THEIR BRAVERY LED TO THE END OF MILITARY SEGREGATION SHORTLY AFTER WORLD WAR II.

53

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

JACKIE ROBINSON

WAS THE ONLY

AFRICAN AMERICAN

ON HIS TEAM—

OR IN THE MAJOR LEAGUES—WHEN HE HELPED LEAD THE A WIN AGAINST THE

NATIONAL LEAGUE

PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES PENNANT IN 1951.

DODGERS

TO

IN THE RACE FOR THE

Truman desegregated the military and, in 1949, Hollywood released Home of the Brave, a serious drama examining the plight of the black soldier in a white-dominated army. Other films examining the problem of race were also released during the late 1940s and early 1950s with blacks portrayed as realistic, dignified characters for the first time. Prior to the 1940s blacks had customarily been portrayed in movies as bumbling, lazy, easily frightened comical servants or caretakers for whites. Though scientists in the late nineteenth century had popularized the idea that human worth was biologically determined by race, the defeat of Fascism, particularly 54

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

Nazism, in World War II largely discredited racism; there seemed little to justify the system of segregation that still existed in the United States. Moreover, as the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union unfolded in the late 1940s, there was outside pressure to end segregation and racism in America. The Soviet Union constantly pointed out the Americans’ hypocrisy: the United States claimed to be a democracy where all were created equal, yet it badly mistreated its black citizens. This was especially troubling as the United States was competing with the Soviet Union for the loyalty of African and Asian countries that were breaking free of European colonialism. During this time, African-American patriotism came under question. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) led an investigation based on remarks allegedly made by singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson in April 1949. The Associated Press reported that Robeson, while in Paris at the Congress of the World Partisans of Peace, said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” Robeson denied ever saying this, although he made similar comments in both Stockholm (Sweden) and Harlem later that spring. The black American leadership quickly distanced itself from the remarks. Jackie Robinson, the most famous African American in the country at the time, testified before HUAC along with other black Americans; all of them affirmed the loyalty of blacks. Furthermore, many whites felt that keeping blacks in a subordinate position in the United States potentially compromised American security and that ending segregation and eradicating racism would be the best way to ensure their loyalty. African-American culture experienced significant changes as well. Jazz was still popular but had shifted from dance music to music for listening. Immediately after 55

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

World War II a new form of jazz called Bebop emerged, led by saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. Bebop evolved partly as a revolt against the whiteness and the formulaic nature of swing music. Young black Bebop musicians wanted jazz to be a true art form, a serious music, and more than a commercial phenomenon, but they also hoped that this music would attract a substantial audience. Unfortunately, Bebop never became a commercial success and had been replaced by “cool jazz” by the early 1950s. Ellison strongly disliked the music of pianist John Lewis and trumpeter Miles Davis. He thought they, and the other younger musicians, were trying to make jazz middle class and obscure its black origins. Invisible Man marked a new phase for AfricanAmerican fiction, ending Wright’s nearly fifteen-year domination. Black writing became less concerned with merely protesting racism or in asserting the humanity of blacks and more interested in delineating AfricanAmerican characters as individuals engaged in distinct battles for meaning and unique struggles against the caprices of fate. This was a common concern among many writers during the 1950s, when the major themes of contemporary American literature were the fear of mass conformity and the oppressive power of a massive, faceless bureaucracy. To be sure, black writers remained interested in race and racism, but the question of identity was being formulated differently. Black authors began to receive serious recognition from the white literary establishment. In 1942 Margaret Walker became the first African American to win the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award for her book For My People. Over the next few decades, Ellison won the National Book Award for Invisible Man and poet Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

56

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

ALONG WITH RALPH ELLISON AND RICHARD WRIGHT, JAMES BALDWIN (PICTURED HERE) BECAME A MAJOR LITERARY FIGURE IN THE POST–WORLD WAR II YEARS.

57

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

James Baldwin, another rising black writer of this period, was frequently published in white literary journals and would, by the 1960s, become a major literary star, bigger than either Ellison or Wright, with his face on the cover of Time magazine on May 17, 1963. Other important black writers to emerge in the 1950s were William Demby, whose 1950 novel Beetlecreek anticipated some of the themes that Ellison explored in Invisible Man, Lorraine Hansberry, whose play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), is the most famous black theater piece in the history of the American stage, William Gardner Smith, William Melvin Kelly, and John A. Williams. Interestingly, both Kelly and Williams would write novels about black jazz musicians.

Racial Politics The day will not save them and we own the night. —Amiri Baraka, 1965 The political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s caused by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War led to the rise of Black Nationalism and the formation of the Black Arts Movement. Playwright and poet Amiri Baraka (formerly, LeRoi Jones) was among the creative and intellectual leaders of this movement, most of whom were highly politicized and strongly left-wing. Baraka was one of the Beat writers, along with Gary Snyder, Diane DiPrima, and Gregory Corso. He became increasingly race conscious and militant until, by the mid–1960s, he left his white wife and Greenwich Village to move to Harlem. Eventually he returned to his boyhood home in Newark, New Jersey, operated a theater group, and espoused Black Nationalism and revolutionary politics. In an interview, Ellison criticized black leaders for limiting themselves to racial issues: “You don’t find black politicians writing books, or having them ghost-written, because they do not take responsibility for the total society. 58

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

AMERICAN POET AMIRI BARAKA (THEN KNOWN AS LEROI JONES) AND DIANE DIPRIMA WERE PROMINENT BEAT WRITERS AND A PROMINENT COUPLE IN THE INTEGRATIONIST 1960S.

They’re trying to work with a small segment of the society. We’re a great part of the American society and its culture, but politically they have been men of narrow vision. We do not initiate or articulate enough issues.” Ellison believed that black leaders segregated themselves from mainstream politics. Ellison supported President Johnson’s legislative efforts—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Poverty, and Medicare. He supported the war in Vietnam as well. This made him very unpopular with younger blacks, and some conservative whites, who hated the Vietnam War and thought that

59

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Johnson’s domestic programs were insufficient. In part, Ellison may have supported the war because he found Johnson’s critics to be presumptuous and arrogant. By supporting Johnson’s civil rights legislation and the war, Ellison was “affirming the principle” upon which the country was founded, as the end of Invisible Man states. The rising political tide of the 1960s among African Americans was based on an increasing anti-Americanism fueled by an attraction to leftist thought and to Black Nationalism. It is clear from Invisible Man that Ellison rejected both leftist thought and Black Nationalism. For Ellison, leftism was a manipulative ideological mix of populist utopian rhetoric and old-fashioned power grabbing. Black Nationalism was narrow and superficial, distorted African-American experience, and denied one of Ellison’s major tenets: that American culture was racially mixed, a blend of black and white. Ellison believed in a form of multiculturalism that he felt Black Nationalism denied. “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word,” Ellison wrote in Invisible Man. “Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. . . . America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s ‘winner take nothing’ that is the great truth of our country or of any country.” He also felt strongly that the cultural reality of African Americans was centered in the United States, not Africa. For him, Africa was not an authenticating source of black identity. Many younger blacks found this sort of thinking naive at best, treasonous at worst, and were upset by Ellison’s depiction of Ras the Exhorter, the Black Nationalist character in Invisible Man. They thought Ellison’s delineation of the character as a romantic psychopath was unjustified, historically inaccurate, and politically naive. By the mid–1960s, Black Nationalism had become the dominant ideology of younger blacks. Ten years later, however, the political storms about identity and politics in 60

The New Negro and Beyond: The Age of Ellison

the black community had calmed and Ellison returned to his status as a respected and celebrated author. Though Invisible Man had cemented Ellison’s place in the pantheon of great American writers, by the 1970s, twenty years had passed since the novel’s first publication. Ellison’s age made his views less relevant to young blacks, and since he was not actively writing, he was less engaged with the ongoing aesthetic and political concerns facing contemporary literature. In the 1980s black authors Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker supplanted Ellison with the reading public, exceeding him in fame and sales. In the 1990s it was Charles Johnson, Ernest Gaines, and John Edgar Wideman who caught the public’s attention. Ellison seemed a figure from the past, a monument, an Olympian, but no longer a truly working novelist.

61

hapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” is grandfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by elling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor ll my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his on, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to vercome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to eath and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something f “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to nderstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it s speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the nvisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-workng family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advoated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible an’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a py in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your ead in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, ndermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, et ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was hocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to the nvisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. He as advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that nables change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man xplaining that he is a member of a hard-working family that stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosphy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father hat he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the nemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in he lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, underCINEMATIC PHOTOGRAPH JEFFdeath WALL DEPICTS PROLOGUE ine ’em withTHIS grins, agree ’emBYto andTHEdestruction, let ’em TO INVISIBLE MAN, IN WHICH THE MAIN CHARACTER FALLS INTO A woller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking FORGOTTEN ROOM IN THE CELLAR OF A LARGE APARTMENT BUILDING dvice that becomes of “a curse” the Invisible Man, IT WITH 1,369 to ILLEGALLY AND DECIDES something TO STAY THERE, RIGGING CONNECTED LIGHTBULBS s he is never quite able. to understand it. He was advised to eep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables hange. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining hat he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his eathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” e advised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I 62 62 ant you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, gree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till

Chapter 3 Reading Invisible Man

Well, you don’t choose the theme, the theme chooses you. —Ralph Ellison, 1963 Invisible Man describes the events of the narrator’s life that caused him to live underground—under the city streets. More broadly, however, the novel is about life as a black man in Harlem during the 1940s. The main character and narrator identifies himself as nothing more than a young black man—he has no name, he’s the invisible man. The novel, which took Ellison seven years to write and was published in 1952, has some autobiographical elements, but it has rarely been interpreted as simply an autobiographical novel.

The Major Characters

The Invisible Man The protagonist escaped from the Black Nationalist madman Ras the Destroyer during a race riot in Harlem and now lives underground. He begins his story by relating how he naively believed in the system and the people who ran it. He went to college with aspirations of gaining acceptance in middle-class mainstream society. When he gets into trouble at an unnamed black southern college, he is expelled. He goes to New York, only to discover that he has been betrayed by the college’s president, Bledsoe. The protagonist winds up joining the Brotherhood, an organization similar to the Communist Party,

63

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

and begins to work against the system that he once believed in, but the Brotherhood betrays him, too.

Mr. Norton Mr. Norton is a wealthy, white, Northern trustee of the unnamed southern black college. He is a condescending patrician who is strangely obsessed with his daughter. The Invisible Man works as Mr. Norton’s chauffeur, driving the old man around campus and the surrounding area. Ultimately, the Invisible Man gets into trouble when he inadvertently takes Mr. Norton to the farm of sharecropper Jim Trueblood, who tells a shocking story of accidentally committing incest. The Invisible Man compounds his problem by taking the stunned Mr. Norton to the Golden Day, a black bar, on the day when the mentally ill black veterans are there. As a result of his misadventures with Mr. Norton, the Invisible Man is expelled from college.

Dr. Bledsoe Dr. Bledsoe is the manipulative, scheming president of the unnamed black college where the Invisible Man is a student. He acts like a submissive, obedient Uncle Tom–type around whites but is a tyrant to blacks. He expels the Invisible Man from the college after learning that he has taken Mr. Norton to a black sharecropper’s farm and to a black tavern. But President Bledsoe misleads the Invisible Man into thinking that he can return to the college when, in reality, he can’t. He gives the Invisible Man several letters of introduction to prominent white men in New York. Though the Invisible Man thinks the letters are meant to help him, they are, in fact, intended to hurt him.

Mr. Emerson Mr. Emerson is the son of the man, also named Mr. Emerson, to whom the Invisible Man has a letter of introduction when he arrives in New York. Mr. Emerson is the last of the prominent white men the Invisible Man tries to 64

Reading Invisible Man

contact, after all the other letters have failed. Mr. Emerson, the son, agrees to see the Invisible Man and finally reveals to him the contents of the letter from Bledsoe. The younger Mr. Emerson has some interaction with blacks; he is of a liberal, bohemian disposition, at odds with his father, and apparently homosexual. He offers to help the Invisible Man, but the Invisible Man refuses the aid.

The Reverend Homer A. Barbee Homer Barbee is the blind minister who gives the powerful epic-sermon on the founder of the Invisible Man’s college (a fictional version of Booker T. Washington) in the campus chapel on Founders’ Day—the same day that the Invisible Man is expelled. It is significant to note that Homer, the Greek epic poet, was also blind.

Peter Wheatstraw Peter Wheatstraw is a street peddler who, pushing a cart full of blueprints, encounters the Invisible Man in Harlem. When the Invisible Man is on his way to Mr. Emerson’s office, the peddler reminds him of his black folk roots. Peetie Wheatstraw (1902–1941) was the stage name of an influential blues singer in the 1930s.

Lucius Brockway Lucius Brokway is the Invisible Man’s black supervisor at Liberty Paints, the company where the Invisible Man works after his meeting with Mr. Emerson. The Invisible Man and Brockway get into a fistfight when Brockway accuses the Invisible Man of being a union spy who is out to get his job. Brockway has been with Liberty Paints since the business started; he is a loyal company man who is intensely anti-union. Brockway leaves the Invisible Man just as the tanks in the basement explode, injuring the Invisible Man so badly that he must be hospitalized. 65

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Mary Rambo Mary Rambo, a Good Samaritan, shelters the Invisible Man after he is discharged from the hospital following the explosion at Liberty Paints. She is very motherly and constantly tells the Invisible Man that she expects him to become a great leader of the race. He tires of this talk and feels guilty that he cannot pay her for her kindness to him. At the end of the novel, during the Harlem riot, the Invisible Man is trying desperately to return to Mary’s apartment.

Brother Jack Brother Jack is the leader of the Brotherhood, a fictionalized version of the Communist Party. Brother Jack, who wears a glass eye, employs the Invisible Man to work for the Brotherhood after hearing him give a public speech on behalf of an elderly black couple who have been evicted from their apartment. In the end, Brother Jack turns out to be as manipulative and dishonest as Dr. Bledsoe.

Ras the Exhorter/Ras the Destroyer Ras the Exhorter, a Jamaican Black Nationalist, hates the Brotherhood, particularly the blacks who belong to it. He thinks the blacks who belong to the Brotherhood are sell-outs, lured by the expectation of having sex with white female members. Ellison depicts sexual encounters between the Invisible Man and two white female members of the Brotherhood, which suggests that the Invisible Man suspected there was some truth in the allegation, although it is clear that he disapproves of Ras and his politics. Ras does not want the Brotherhood operating in Harlem, which Ras considers his turf. At the end of the novel, he hunts down the Invisible Man on horseback and tries to kill him with a spear.

66

Reading Invisible Man

Tod Clifton Tod Clifton is the handsome, young Harlem operative for the Brotherhood. His dark skin and good looks charm the women and elicit the admiration of Ras the Exhorter, although Tod hates Ras. For some reason, Tod leaves the Brotherhood after the Invisible Man is transferred from Harlem to the downtown (white) area of New York City. Tod winds up selling dancing Black Sambo dolls on the street corner before being fatally shot by a white policeman. His murder is one of the causes of the riot at the end of the novel.

Brother Tarp Another Harlem operative for the Brotherhood, Brother Tarp escaped from a chain gang years earlier. He admires the Invisible Man and gives him a portrait of Frederick Douglass. He also gives the Invisible Man a twisted link from one of the chains that he broke in order to make his escape.

Brother Tobitt and Brother Wrestrum Brothers Tobitt and Wrestrum are two members of the Brotherhood. Tobitt (“two-bit”) is white and Wrestrum (“restroom”) is black. Both men hate the Invisible Man and constantly try to undermine his leadership. Tobitt is married to a black woman and uses that to validate his understanding of African-American life and his membership in the Brotherhood.

Sybil Sybil is the white wife of one of the important white members of the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man tries to seduce her in order to get information and she, in turn, is infatuated with the idea of being “raped” by a black man.

67

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Scofield and Dupre Scofield and Dupre are the two black men the Invisible Man meets during the Harlem riot at the end of the novel. They organize a group to burn down their apartment building where Dupre’s son died from tuberculosis.

The Novel

The Prologue The novel opens with a prologue in which the reader quickly learns that all the major action of the novel has already ended. As the narrator says at the end of the last chapter, “The end was in the beginning” (571). The entire novel is told in flashback. The Invisible Man is living underground “in a border area” (5) as a result of the events he relates in the novel. The prologue introduces one of the most important themes of the novel: that of light and shadow, or blindness and clear vision. As the reader learns in the prologue, the Invisible Man is living in a “hole in the basement” (7) where he is illegally obtaining electric power to light 1,369 light bulbs. This image of the Invisible Man in an underground hole flooded with light refers, in part, to Plato’s Cave, the allegory Socrates tells his young student in Book VII of The Republic. Socrates relates a story in which people are trapped in a cave, watching shadow images on the wall in front of them, their heads locked in place, thinking these images are reality—the objects themselves and not just shadows of the objects. One day one of them is free to move around and discovers the truth: He has been locked in a cave watching shadows, not the real objects. He emerges to see the world and, at first, is uncomfortable with his liberation, but he eventually learns to adjust to the new reality that he experiences. In light of this parallel, the prologue makes it clear that Invisible Man is an “education” novel. It is a book about how the main character came to understand 68

Reading Invisible Man

the world—to emerge from his cave—and see things clearly. In this cave, unlike Plato’s, the Invisible Man sees no shadow because there is too much light to cast any shadow. In fact, Ellison has reversed the role of the cave: The Invisible Man goes to the cave as part of his enlightenment about the world. He escapes to the cave, not from it. Invisible Man echoes Plato’s allegory of the cave in suggesting that we can only learn directly from experience, not in school. Before he finds enlightment in the cave, the Invisible Man has various teachers throughout the novel who disillusion him, but it cannot be said that any of them actually teach him. They all, intentionally or unintentionally, reveal the nature of the world through their actions. The other source for an underground man is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes from Underground (1864), one of the books that deeply influenced Ellison. Dostoyevsky’s story, a first-person account like Invisible Man, is about a bitter, misanthropic, probably insane young man who lives alone in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the first part of the story, he rails against mainstream society and against utilitarianism, a form of rationalism that argues that life and happiness can be understood statistically and treated logically, that human beings can be made to act in their own best interest. The second part of the story is about several unsuccessful interactions the Underground Man has with other people, including two women. These events occurred before the first part of the story and are told in flashback. In the end, Notes from Underground argues for the necessity of free will: Human beings must break free of being predictable by exercising their free will, even if they wind up doing something that is self-destructive. The expression of free will, therefore, becomes a form of rebellion. It is easy to see how Dostoevsky’s story influenced Ellison’s prologue in Invisible Man. Ellison’s hero is also bitter and misanthropic, and he may even be crazy.

69

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Like Notes from Underground, it is clear from the prologue that Invisible Man is about alienation. With Ellison, this alienation is complex: The hero is alienated from a society that not only fails to see him as a black person, but also fails to see beyond the limitations of racism, the mistaken belief that some of us are more human than others or that some of us have the right to define others as we wish. The theme of invisibility and vision appears throughout the novel. Ellison’s protagonist feels happier now that he knows that he is invisible. However, he still occasionally gets angry about his invisibility. He recalls nearly killing a white man who bumped into him and called him a racial epithet, until he realized that the white man did not see him, but only a stereotype, a projection of his own imagination. This is why the Invisible Man is invisible. No one truly sees him for what and who he is.

Chapters 1 through 6 The first six chapters tell the first stage of the Invisible Man’s career: how he earned a scholarship to attend college and how he wound up getting expelled. Chapter 1, which contains the battle royal sequence, is one of the most famous scenes in American literature and the most frequently anthologized portion of Invisible Man. Indeed, it was excerpted before the book was published. Battle Royal Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in [its] place” (16). His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country” (16). He advised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and

70

Reading Invisible Man

destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16). It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” (17) to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Speechmaking is an important theme in the novel since much of what happens to the Invisible Man, a selfdefined orator, revolves around the speeches he gives. After his account of his grandfather’s deathbed advice, the Invisible Man recalls how he was invited to give his graduation speech to a group of important white men. The Invisible Man envisions himself “as a potential Booker T. Washington” (18). This aspiration for leadership is a constant theme throughout the novel and explains why the Invisible Man wants to give speeches—he sees them as a means to success and power. Unfortunately, before he can give his graduation speech he must endure being part of the battle royal with nine other black boys. They must fight in a boxing ring for the enjoyment of the white men. Symbolically, his intelligence and abilities make the Invisible Man one of the Talented Tenth, the black leadership elite that Du Bois said was necessary for the development of the race. Yet the leaders of the town see no difference between him and the other boys, and he must fight with them. The boys are then blindfolded and forced to fight each other. The narrative begins with a scene depicting blindness and partial sight, referring back to Plato’s cave, and to the Invisible Man’s basement. The Invisible Man loses the battle royal; he and the other boys are further humiliated by having to grab their payment from an electrified rug. When the Invisible Man finally gives his speech, it is virtually identical to the famous one given by Booker T. Washington in September 1895, the Atlanta Compromise speech that accepted racial segregation. The audience

71

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

seems to be paying no attention to it until the Invisible Man accidentally says “social equality” (31) when he meant to say “social responsibility” (30–31). During the days of segregation, whites, particularly Southern whites, opposed any notion that blacks were socially equal to whites. But social responsibility will become an important concern in the novel. Near the end of the prologue the Invisible Man had asserted, “Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (14). After the speech, the Invisible Man is awarded a scholarship to a nearby black college and given a leather briefcase that will become increasingly important as the novel progresses. The memory of his grandfather spoils his enjoyment of his success. He dreams that he finds a letter inside his briefcase. He opens it only to find another letter and another, seemingly endlessly, until he finally reaches a letter that says: “To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (33). The grandfather then laughs at the Invisible Man. Also in the first chapter Ellison seamlessly introduces three prominent black men of the early twentieth century who serve as distinct models of leadership: Booker T. Washington, the Invisible Man’s role model; W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Talented Tenth theory is represented by the Invisible Man; and boxer Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (1908–1915), who fought in some battle royals as an adolescent. Tuskegee University In chapter 2, the Invisible Man is a student at a fictionalized version of Tuskegee University in Alabama. To earn money, the Invisible Man chauffeurs Mr. Norton, one of the school’s rich white trustees, who tells the Invisible Man that he should read Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mr. Norton also tells the Invisible Man, “You are important because if you fail, I have failed by one individual, 72

Reading Invisible Man

one defective cog” (45). The symbolism of describing people as machine parts recurs throughout the novel. When the Invisible Man inadvertently blurts out that Trueblood, a poor farmer, impregnated both his wife and daughter, Norton insists on meeting the man—a visit for which the Invisible Man later gets in trouble. Trueblood tells an eager, fascinated Norton the story of how he committed incest with his daughter, Matty Lou, who slept on the same pallet as her parents. His story is the first powerful vernacular speech in the novel. Trueblood had a dream that he had sex with a white woman. Just as he awoke to tell the dream to his wife, he discovered that he was sexually connected to his daughter, who was horrified and tried to push him off. Trueblood says, “There I was, tryin’ to git away with all my might, yet having to move without movin’” (59). When his wife Kate woke up and found her husband and daughter having sex, she tried to kill Trueblood with an ax. Trueblood intended to lie still for his punishment, but moved at the last moment: “Though I meant to keep still, I moves! Anybody but Jesus Christ hisself woulda moved” (64). The need to move without moving is another recurring metaphor in the novel. The dream itself conflates three sexual taboos: committing incest, having sex with a white woman, and infidelity. Trueblood is ostracized by his neighbors, but whites are infatuated with his story; they give him money and prevent the black men from harming him. After Trueblood tells his story, Mr. Norton is shocked that Trueblood has committed a terrible moral offense but seems hardly affected by it. Mr. Norton insists that the Invisible Man take him to get a drink. The Invisible Man makes his second mistake of the day. The Golden Day Chapter 3 describes what happens when the Invisible Man and Norton go to a combined tavern and brothel called 73

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

the Golden Day. They arrive on the day that the local black asylum has temporarily released its patients for recreation under the guardianship of Supercargo, a warden who symbolizes the superego. The patients are war veterans and members of the black elite: “doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist” (74). The composition of this black elite mirrors the white audience to whom the Invisible Man read his graduation speech at the start of the novel, but the two groups are not viewed the same way by society. While the white group has power, the black group is crazy. The social equality that the Invisible Man accidentally spoke of in his graduation address is nonexistent. Inside, the patients rebel against Supercargo, beat him into unconsciousness, and run wild. The Invisible Man frantically wants to get Mr. Norton away from the fracas at the Golden Day but he cannot. During the melee Mr. Norton passes out and the Invisible Man is near hysterics, thinking the old man has died. However, one of the crazy inmates at the Golden Day is a physician who takes Mr. Norton to one of the prostitutes’ rooms and revives him. Surprising Mr. Norton by correctly diagnosing his illness, the veteran tells about earning his medical degree and going to France during World War I. He observes that neither Mr. Norton nor the Invisible Man sees one another as human: “To you,” he says to Mr. Norton, “he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man. . . . And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force” (95). Again, the reader is made aware of a system of stark social inequality. Mr. Norton, now angry, leaves the Golden Day. The Invisible Man is terrified that he will get into trouble with the school’s administration for the day’s excursions.

74

Reading Invisible Man

Repercussions In chapter 4 the Invisible Man takes Mr. Norton to Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the college, who is upset by the day’s events. As the Invisible Man walks the campus, certain he will be expelled, he realizes that he deeply loves the school and believes wholeheartedly in the vision of the Founder. At the end of the chapter, the Invisible Man is instructed to go to Mr. Norton’s apartment where the trustee explains that he has told Dr. Bledsoe what has happened and that the Invisible Man was not at fault. The Invisible Man leaves the apartment feeling more hopeful about his situation and his upcoming meeting with Dr. Bledsoe. Chapter 5 establishes Ellison’s two different views of Booker T. Washington. First, there is the myth of the legendary Founder, the larger-than-life, self-sacrificing leader who built a school from nothing and led the way for his race. This story is told by the Rev. Homer Barbee in the second of the powerful vernacular narratives in the novel. Barbee’s story is actually based on a speech given by Emmett J. Scott, Booker T. Washington’s personal secretary, who Ellison heard while a student at Tuskegee. The theme of blindness recurs here when the reader learns, at the end of his magnificent speech, that Homer Barbee is blind. This suggests that Barbee did not see the real man beneath the image of the selfless Founder. The real man is Dr. Bledsoe, who makes himself meek and mild before his white trustees, “a barefoot boy who in his fervor for education had trudged with his bundle of ragged clothing across two states” (116). (This is a slight fictionalizing of Booker T. Washington’s actual story as described in Up From Slavery.) “To us he was more than just a president of a college,” writes the Invisible Man of Bledsoe. “He was a leader, a ‘statesman’ who carried our problems to those above us, even unto the White House. . . . He was our leader and our magic, who kept the endowment high,

75

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

THE

DR. BLEDSOE IS UNIVERSALLY BELIEVED TO HAVE BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, THE MAN WHO CREATED AND TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE WITH AN IRON HAND.

CHARACTER OF

BEEN BASED ON RAN THE

76

Reading Invisible Man

the funds for scholarships plentiful and publicity moving through the channels of the press. He was our coal-black daddy of whom we were afraid” (116). Dr. Bledsoe is described in chapter 6 as having “half of his broad face in the shadow” (137) when he meets with the Invisible Man after the chapel service. Ellison uses the contrast between light and dark—good and evil— when Bledsoe’s head goes back “into the shadow” (141) to suggest there is nothing good about him. Bledsoe’s physical appearance is indicative of his deviousness and his two-faced nature. Bledsoe upbraids the Invisible Man for taking Mr. Norton to Trueblood’s farm and the Golden Day: Dr. Bledsoe is surprised by the Invisible Man’s naivety and his inability to manipulate whites. He explains to the Invisible Man that it is a common survival tactic for blacks to tell whites what whites want to hear, but not necessarily what whites want to know. The Invisible Man is angry when he learns that he is being expelled, threatening Dr. Bledsoe with exposure. Dr. Bledsoe replies, “Tell anyone you like . . . Negroes don’t control this school or much of anything else—haven’t you learned even that?” (142). Bledsoe is kind to whites and harsh to blacks as a survival tactic. Instead of confronting the inequality, he learns how to exploit it. By portraying Bledsoe this way, Ellison is representing Washington as cynical, obsessed with power and control. This is the Washington who ran the Tuskegee machine, not the great visionary educator. Bledsoe tells the Invisible Man, “You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity—you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people— then stay in the dark and use it!” (145). Washington was called the Wizard by his followers, perhaps a reference to the Wizard of Oz, who manipulated others in the dark behind a curtain, another instance where darkness obscures reality and man becomes a machine.

77

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Clearly, the conversation with Bledsoe has been revealing for the Invisible Man but he is still a long way from fully realizing how devious the world is. The Invisible Man picks up the letters of referral that Bledsoe writes for him, after deciding to leave the school to earn money in New York City. He is under the impression that he may be able to return. Among Bledsoe’s parting advice to him is to “accept responsibility” (148), although Dr. Bledsoe is simply being duplicitous in this. The Invisible Man promises Dr. Bledsoe he will not open the seven letters of introduction. Even though he has seen Bledsoe’s two-faced nature, the Invisible Man trusts him with his future, not suspecting that the president would try to hinder him.

Chapters 7 through 12 These chapters deal with the Invisible Man’s adjustment to living in New York City, which signals the first substantial change in the Invisible Man’s attitude and outlook on life. The move to New York is the beginning of the real education of the Invisible Man. After discovering Dr. Bledsoe’s treachery, he becomes less naive and more cynical. He also begins to accept his cultural reality as a black person, becoming less ashamed of his roots and background. He learns to understand himself better and accept himself for what he is. New York City In chapter 7, the Invisible Man boards the bus to New York to find that the only other passenger is the patient who revived Mr. Norton at the Golden Day. The veteran speaks of going to New York as moving “[o]ut of the fire into the melting pot” (152), characterizing how African Americans who were leaving the South felt about their departure. The soldier mentions that the Invisible Man will find more freedom in the North: “You might even dance with a white girl” (152), he says. 78

Reading Invisible Man

Ellison uses the theme of sight and blindness in the veteran’s advice to the Invisible Man: “Learn to look beneath the surface.” It is important to see both what is apparent, and also what is latent. Furthermore, the veteran advises, “Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself. . . . Play the game, but play it your own way—part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.” Where the Invisible Man was once a cog, he is now a machine that operates as a whole. “You’re hidden right out in the open—that is, you would be if you only realized it,” the soldier says, making the first reference to the black man’s invisibility. He continues, “They wouldn’t see you because they don’t expect you to know anything” (153–154). Despite the veteran’s advice, the Invisible Man’s attitude remains the same: “I would work hard and serve my employer so well that he would shower Dr. Bledsoe with favorable reports. And I would save my money and return in the fall full of New York culture” (156–157). When he arrives in New York, he gets on the subway to Harlem. He is surprised by how large and crowded the city is, and how invisible he is. This is his first encounter with the anonymity of big city life. He is pushed up against a white girl while on the subway but she does not react, which would have been unthinkable in the South. When he finally reaches Harlem, he is shocked by the number of black people he sees. He witnesses a black man on a ladder “yelling something in a staccato West Indian accent, at which the crowd yelled threateningly” (159). He is not only surprised to see “so many black men angry in public” (160) responding to the speaker’s speech, but also to see white policemen standing around indifferent to all of it. This is the Invisible Man’s first encounter with the Black Nationalist, Ras the Exhorter. Finally, he gets directions to the Men’s House and rents a room. 79

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

The Job Hunt Chapter 8 begins with the Invisible Man deciding that he must get a job. He has confidence that Dr. Bledsoe’s letters will help him. Indeed, he fantasizes about becoming a younger version of Dr. Bledsoe—a leading member of the black elite making a speech. It does not matter to him what he is saying, only that he is making a speech that impresses whoever his audience might be. He begins his search for a job the next day, going to Wall Street, where he sees “Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded [him] fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang” (164). He finds the whites in the city to be “impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd” (168). He delivers nearly all of the letters but fails to gain an appointment to see any of the men to whom they are addressed. In desperation, as his money has run out, the Invisible Man decides to give Mr. Emerson his last letter in person. He writes Mr. Emerson asking for an appointment, explaining that he has a message from Dr. Bledsoe. Finally, he receives a letter from Mr. Emerson. Chapter 9 is one of the more complex chapters of the novel. It opens with the Invisible Man on his way to meet Mr. Emerson. He meets a man pushing a cart “piled high with rolls of blue paper and [hears] him singing in a clear ringing voice” (172–173). He learns that the man’s name is Peter Wheatstraw. Apparently, Ellison knew the real Peetie Wheatstraw, the stage name of a blues singer and pianist who was popular in the 1930s. Ellison based his characterization on the actual person. Wheatstraw calls himself “the Devil’s only son-in-law” (176), which is exactly how the real Peetie Wheatstraw billed himself. This is the first of several scenes in the book in which the Invisible Man begins to come to terms with himself as

80

Reading Invisible Man

a black person. He starts to acknowledge his culture, something that he has worked hard to suppress in order to succeed, in part because he is ashamed of it. With this scene, Ellison suggests that one of the reasons for the Invisible Man’s naivety, his fumbling in his life, is that he has lost the black cultural supports that his community uses to survive. After leaving Wheatstraw, the Invisible Man stops to get breakfast at a diner and is insulted when the counterman offers him a black southern breakfast of pork chops and grits. To refuse the southern-style breakfast was, according to the Invisible Man, “an act of discipline” (178). But it is clear that he has not learned the lesson of his encounter with Wheatstraw: He still cannot accept his cultural past or his black Southern roots. As he leaves the diner, he notices that a blond, fair-skinned man is eating the breakfast of pork chops and grits that he refused. This suggests a subtle mixing of cultures and calls into question whether the counterman was judging the Invisible Man by his skin color or just trying to make a sale. The Invisible Man is awed by Mr. Emerson’s office, which “was like a museum” (180). “A huge colored map” covers one wall, under which “sat glass specimen jars containing natural products of the various countries”; he sees “paintings, bronzes, tapestries” (180). He assumes the young blond man who greets him is Mr. Emerson’s secretary and hands him Bledsoe’s letter. The man is actually Mr. Emerson’s son, also called Mr. Emerson. The Invisible Man prefers Mr. Emerson’s office to his college’s museum, which contained “only a few cracked relics from slavery times: an iron pot, an ancient bell, a set of ankle-irons and links of chain, a primitive loom, a spinning wheel, a gourd for drinking, an ugly ebony African god that seemed to sneer (presented to the school by some traveling millionaire), a leather whip with cooper braids, a branding iron with the double letter MM” (181). When

81

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

the Invisible Man recalls visiting the college museum, he remembers that he could not bear to look at these items. Young Mr. Emerson returns and questions the Invisible Man, asking him if he intends to return to college (to which the Invisible Man answers yes) and would consider going to another college (to which the Invisible Man answers no). The Invisible Man tells young Mr. Emerson he has not read Bledsoe’s letter. The entire interview seems puzzling to the Invisible Man, who cannot understand the point of it. The Invisible Man speaks of his admiration for Dr. Bledsoe and how he would like to be just like him. Young Emerson cautions him that “ambition . . . can be blinding” (184), yet another reference to sight and vision. The Invisible Man grows more desperate, asking to speak to Mr. Emerson. Emerson insists he wishes to help but “to help you I must disillusion you” (187), he says. Like the man in Plato’s cave, the Invisible Man must give up his false images and ideas so that he can truly see reality for what it is. Young Emerson tells the Invisible Man that perhaps he should not go back to school. “There is so much you could do here where there is more freedom” (188), he says. The Invisible Man continues to insist that he wishes to see Mr. Emerson and finally Young Emerson reveals himself as the senior Mr. Emerson’s son. He also shows the Invisible Man Dr. Bledsoe’s letter, which proves that there was never any intention on Bledsoe’s part to have the Invisible Man return to school. Indeed, the letter was meant to harm him by keeping him running in a sense of false hope. Emerson offers the Invisible Man a job as his valet, which he refuses. He then suggests going to Liberty Paints. The Invisible Man leaves, crestfallen. Liberty Paints In chapter 10 the Invisible Man decides to follow Emerson’s advice and gets a job at Liberty Paints. He

82

Reading Invisible Man

learns that black college boys are being hired to replace regular workers because they will work for less than union wages. For the first time the Invisible Man encounters industrial life and union strife. His first job at the factory is to put ten drops of “dead black” (200) liquid into a white paint called “Optic White” to make it whiter. His gruff boss, Kimbro, is pleased with the job the Invisible Man is doing, saying, “that’s paint that’ll cover just about anything” (202). And then, “It’s the purest white that can be found” (202). The symbolism here is obvious; the ten drops of black liquid represent the 10 percent of the population that is African American. The white paint is white America. The Invisible Man stirs the black mixture into the white paint in order for it to disappear, so that no one knows it exists. In short, the white paint is the whitewash of American culture that covers black people, makes them invisible. However, the Invisible Man noticed as he painted his samples that the paint, as it dried, “was not as white and glossy as before; it had a gray tinge” (203). This is Ellison’s vision of America, a mixed country, a blend of black and white, not a whitewash over blackness. Blacks and whites are blended whether or not they wish to acknowledge the blend. Indeed, for Ellison, the biggest illusion the country suffers from is its insistence that it can suppress or ignore the blend. When his boss becomes dissatisfied with the Invisible Man’s work, he is reassigned to Lucius Brockway. The Invisible Man has another unsatisfactory encounter with an older father/authority figure in his experience with Brockway. The Invisible Man meets Brockway by pushing through a door marked “Danger,” so perhaps both he and the reader are being warned. Brockway is extremely suspicious of the Invisible Man upon his arrival in the “deep basement” (207). Brockway suspects that the Invisible

83

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Man is either a spy for the union or is going to take his job. He asks him many questions, which begins to annoy the Invisible Man. Brockway seems a bit more at ease when he learns that the Invisible Man is not an engineer. Brockway has worked at Liberty Paints since it started, and “even helped dig the first foundation” (209). This epitomizes Ellison’s belief that blacks have been instrumental in the founding of the nation, as Liberty Paints seems, in some respects, a metaphor for the United States. Brockway values his relationship with “the Old Man” (208), Sparland, the founder of the company. Brockway is strongly anti-union—the type of worker who trusts the paternalistic benevolence of the bosses. Some older blacks or members of the black elite enjoyed the favors of the white elite while being despised by working-class whites, who were jealous of their favored status and hated their loyalty to the bosses. This situation intensified the racism of working-class whites and strained race relations in the labor movement. Brockway warns the Invisible Man to monitor the gauges on the tanks that make the paint. The Invisible Man remains wary of Brockway but accepts him as his supervisor and follows his instructions. Once again, the theme of humans as machines comes up when Brockway observes, “They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine” (217). The whiteness of the white paint and how well it can obliterate blackness is emphasized: “We make the best white paint in the world, I don’t give a damn what nobody says. Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through!” (217) Brockway brags. Brockway breaks for lunch and the Invisible Man goes back to the locker room in Building No. 1 to get his own lunch. He inadvertently stumbles upon a union meeting. When he reveals to the gathering that he works for Lucius 84

Reading Invisible Man

Brockway, he discovers that Brockway is thoroughly hated by the union men. Tension grows, but the chairman calms the workers and they permit the Invisible Man to leave with his lunch. The Invisible Man is disappointed by how the union treated him: “I felt that every man present looked upon me with hostility; and though I had lived with hostility all my life, now for the first time it seemed to reach me, as though I had expected more of these men than of others” (223). The Invisible Man is so upset by his encounter he cannot eat his lunch. When Brockway learns that the Invisible Man was at a union meeting, he screams at him to leave and threatens to kill him. The relationship between the Invisible Man and the older black men is complicated, affected by racial politics and the emasculation these men experienced in their daily interactions with whites. The humiliations they endured at the hands of whites have made them more insistent on receiving respect from members of their own race and the acknowledgment that they are the equals of white men. There is an undercurrent of an Oedipal complex between the older and younger black men that is blended into the politics of race. The two men get into a fistfight. This is the second major fist fight between black men that occurs in the novel. After being subdued, Brockway cries out that he hates the union because they are after his job. He thinks it is an act of treachery to one’s employer to join a union. While the two men were fighting, they ignored the gauges. The boilers begin to hiss. Brockway tells the Invisible Man to start turning down the valves. “And it was as though the closing of his sticky hand over mine was a signal” (229), the Invisible Man states. Brockway runs away from the boilers, while telling the Invisible Man to keep turning the valves. “I seemed to hear Brockway laugh as I looked around to see him scrambling for the stairs” (229), the Invisible Man observed. The Invisible Man’s hands are now sticky with pitch and he struggles to free them from the valves as the basement explodes. 85

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

In chapter 11 the Invisible Man awakes in a hospital in some sort of metal contraption. The white doctors have attached electrodes to him and are administering electric shock treatments to deal with what seems to be a head injury. The scene signals the rebirth of the Invisible Man, “My mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live” (233). Later in the chapter he says, “I felt a tug at my belly and looked down to see one of the physicians pull the cord which was attached to the stomach node, jerking me forward” (243). This recreates the cutting of the umbilical cord of a newborn baby. The doctors consider giving the Invisible Man a lobotomy, a surgical procedure in which a portion of the frontal lobe of the brain is removed. It was a radical and largely unsuccessful treatment for people who suffered from severe mental and emotional illness. The machine attached to the Invisible Man is supposed to perform this task without the intrusion of surgery. The Invisible Man saves himself from a lobotomy by beginning to remember his cultural past—the folk tales and the blues he heard as a child. As the treatment unfolds, the entire identity of the Invisible Man is at stake. The Invisible Man considers rebellion: “I fell to plotting ways of short-circuiting the machine. Perhaps if I shifted my body about so that the two modes would come together—No, not only was there no room but it might electrocute me. I shuddered. Whoever else I was, I was no Samson. I had no desire to destroy myself even if it destroyed the machine; I wanted freedom, not destruction. . . . When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” (243) Finally, the Invisible Man rejects openly rebellious but self-destructive behavior, no matter how much it might

86

Reading Invisible Man

hurt the whites or damage their possessions, because ultimately it will kill him. His problem has been that he has had no idea who he really is. He has lived according to other people’s values and expectations. After the treatment, he is put through a brief interview where he is told he is not “ready for the rigors of industry” (246) and is being released from his job with compensation. The Invisible Man leaves the factory hospital with a new realization, a new self-understanding: “I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid” (249). He takes the train back to Harlem. Mary Rambo Chapter 12 introduces Mary Rambo, who rescues the Invisible Man when he passes out on the street as he leaves the subway train. She is a Good Samaritan, offering to take care of him until he gets back on his feet. There is no hint of any sexual attraction or connection between the two characters. Mary plays a maternal role. She takes the Invisible Man to her house, where he sleeps for a long time. She offers him a place to stay, but he decides to return to the Men’s House. However, when he returns to the Men’s House in the white overalls that he was given at the factory hospital, he is immediately snubbed by the other guests, representatives of the black elite—college boys, race leaders, businessmen—fashionably dressed but with shallow minds and silly pretensions. He begins to hold these people in contempt as they hate him for having failed. The precarious and insecure black middle-class elite feels he has betrayed their values and threatens their status with his presence. He feels that the black elite has sacrificed him, abandoned him to maintain their shaky standing with powerful whites. Ultimately, he is forced to leave the Men’s House when he angrily

87

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

douses a Baptist preacher with the contents of a spittoon, mistakenly believing the man is Dr. Bledsoe. He returns to Mary Rambo to rent a room. Mary constantly reminds the Invisible Man about leadership and responsibility and rekindles in him the desire to be a race leader. The Invisible Man wants to be worthy of Mary’s expectations. As he grows more resentful about what has happened to him, he decides he wants to make speeches again: “While walking along the streets words would spill from my lips in a mumble over which I had little control” (259–260). He longs to go home and grows restless under Mary’s pressure to fulfill her idea of his racial destiny.

Chapters 13 through 17 These chapters chronicle the Invisible Man’s involvement with the Brotherhood, Ellison’s fictionalized version of the Communist Party. Chapter 13 begins with the Invisible Man leaving Mary’s apartment, seized by a sense of restlessness and frustration. He walks along the streets on a snowy, cold afternoon. He passes a shop that sells religious articles and another displaying “ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. ‘You too can be truly beautiful,’ a sign proclaims. ‘Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set’” (262). This particularly upsets the Invisible Man, who has to suppress “a savage urge to push [his] fist through the pane” (262). Even though blacks are more accepted in New York, they are still considered inferior. The sign indicates that social equality is not a reality, even in the eyes of blacks themselves. They believe that their inherent value will increase as their skin color lightens. I Yam What I Am It is just after he passes this shop window that he encounters an old man selling baked yams on a street corner.

88

Reading Invisible Man

The odor of the cooked yams creates “a stab of swift nostalgia” (262) in the Invisible Man as he remembers eating baked yams at home. The Invisible Man approaches the vendor, buys a hot yam, breaks it open, adds a slab of butter, and eats it. “I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom—simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper” (264), writes the Invisible Man. He then thinks about how easy it was to shame black people “by confronting us with something we liked” (264). Watermelon, fried chicken, pork chops, chitterlings, and other foods were used as unflattering symbols of black stereotypes, even though whites ate these foods as well. By eating a distinctly southern food without feeling embarrassed, the Invisible Man is showing signs of change. The Invisible Man remembers that Dr. Bledsoe was a secret lover of chitterlings and considers how exposing Bledsoe in this way would destroy his career. In other words, the status of important black people at the time was built on how successfully they avoided being associated with black traditions. In this important scene, the Invisible Man has decided to clearly reject this form of oppression and self-hatred. The Invisible Man concludes, “I am what I am” or, as he says a little later, “I yam what I am” (266). He also calls yams his “birthmark” (266). He buys two more yams and as he eats them, asks himself, “What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” (266). By avoiding things associated with black culture in order to appear less black, African Americans condemn black culture as inferior in order to be seen more favorably in the eyes of whites. Even so, the Invisible Man’s acceptance of his black culture has it limits. He reaches the end of the yam and

89

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

experiences “an unpleasant taste”; the end “had been frostbitten” (267), so the Invisible Man throws it into the street. Ellison is suggesting here that the cultural recognition is not the end of the journey for the Invisible Man, for this, by itself, is not the acquisition of true self-knowledge. His racial self-acceptance is only a partial liberation from the nonsense and hypocrisy that he had come to accept. Dispossession The Invisible Man then stumbles upon an eviction; three white men are putting an old black woman out of her apartment. When the Invisible Man first comes upon her belongings in the street, he thinks it is “a lot of junk waiting to be hauled away” (267). The old woman is feebly striking at the white men who remove her on her sofa. The crowd gathered around is “sullen-faced” (267). Someone in the crowd says that “all they need is a leader” (268). Her husband appears and says it is the bank, not the white movers, that is the problem. But the old woman wails, “It’s all the white folks, not just one. They all against us. Every stinking low-down one of them” (270). The Invisible Man is deeply moved by the couple’s plight. He begins to survey and enumerate their belongings, revisiting African-American history through the items: a straightening comb, nuggets of High John the Conqueror, an Ethiopian flag, a tintype of Abraham Lincoln, pieces of chipped china, a plate of the St. Louis World’s Fair, a Masonic emblem, a card from grandchildren, and so on. Then he sees a sheet of paper: “FREE PAPERS. Be It Known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo, has been freed by men this sixth day of August 1859” (272). The old couple’s cheap possessions have no market value, but they have incredible psychological and cultural importance. They are symbols around which the crowd gathers. When the white marshal won’t allow the old woman to go back in the house to pray, the crowd gets riled up 90

Reading Invisible Man

and the marshal waves his gun to maintain control. The Invisible Man recognizes that the crowd is primed to attack the white man and, “afraid and angry, repelled and fascinated” (275) at the possibility, he climbs the steps to address the crowd. He describes himself as “totter[ing] on the edge of a great dark hole” (275) right before he begins speaking. The imagery refers to the beginning of the novel when the Invisible Man is living underground in a basement—a hole that is brightly illuminated. This “dark hole,” however, represents what “violence might release in [him]” (275) if the crowd resorts to destructive mob mentality. He tells the crowd that it needs to organize. He is hesitant at first, since this is early in his speechmaking career, and thinks to himself, “If they laugh, I’ll die.” The speech he gives is confusing. It is unclear whether he wants the crowd to attack the marshal “with his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit” (279) or whether he wants to calm the crowd, as the marshal believes. The reader learns that the old man is eighty-seven and was a day laborer. The Invisible Man surveys their possessions and says that they have little to show for their lives. But he adds, “They’re our people, your people and mine, your parents and mine” (278). Unlike Bledsoe, the Invisible Man is not trying to reject black culture. Here, he embraces it and proclaims to a crowd that it is his culture. Someone in the crowd says that the couple has “been dispossessed” (278) and the Invisible Man takes up that theme, asking how someone can be dispossessed who had nothing to start with. Interestingly, the word dispossession is used frequently in the remaining chapters of the novel. It was not only a favorite word of leftists to describe the exploitation of the masses, but also a word to describe losing oneself—or at least an important part of oneself—in a society that is driven solely by market values. Finally, the crowd loses patience with the Invisible Man’s rambling speech. They rush the marshal, disarm 91

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

him, and chase him away. The Invisible Man then suggests having a prayer meeting in the couple’s apartment, so everyone carries the furniture back inside. It is at this point that he notices some whites who are helping. They call themselves friends of the people and believers in brotherhood. The police arrive and the Invisible Man speaks up, becoming the spokesman for the crowd. More police arrive and the Invisible Man, in a panic, tries to get away. The Brotherhood As the Invisible Man is walking across the street, having escaped the police, he is accosted by a “short insignificantlooking bushy-eyebrowed man” (287) who congratulates him for his speech. He invites the Invisible Man to have coffee and explains that he works for an organization called the Brotherhood. This is the reader’s first introduction to Brother Jack. He discusses the Invisible Man’s speech at length, praising it, “You aroused them so quickly to action. I don’t understand how you managed it” (289). The Invisible Man is not sure why he made the speech, saying, “I wanted to make a speech. I like to make speeches” (293). Brother Jack dismisses the evicted couple as “agrarian types” (290), indicating a hierarchy even within the race. Brother Jack also warns the Invisible Man not to “waste [his] emotions on individuals, they don’t count” (291). Brother Jack’s attitude is scientific and much will be made of this sort of science as the book continues. He tells the Invisible Man, “History has been born in your brain” (291). The Invisible Man is unsure whether he wants to work for the Brotherhood, but he takes Brother Jack’s card. He is suspicious: “Everybody wanted to use you for some purpose. Why should he want me as a speaker?” (294). Chapter 14 begins with the Invisible Man lamenting

92

Reading Invisible Man

the fact that he has no job and that Mary has been forced to cook cabbage because she is short of money. He has lived with Mary for months. He feels guilty for not being able to pay his rent, although she does not press him for it. He decides to take the job with the Brotherhood and calls Brother Jack, who tells him to go to a certain address. A car with Brother Jack and several other men meets him there and they all go to a party at “an expensive-looking building in a strange part of the city” (299). The Invisible Man sees “Chthonian” written on the storm awning (299). Chthonia is the Greek underworld of the dead, another reference to an underground world. It is also a reference to the subversive nature of some aspects of the Communist Party in the United States. The Invisible Man, Brother Jack, and the others arrive at an apartment where “a smartly dressed woman” with a “hard, handsome face” (300) greets them. The woman’s name is Emma. They enter an expensive apartment “lined with books and decorated with old musical instruments” (300). There are many well-dressed men and women standing around talking in groups. No one pays any attention to the Invisible Man. “It was as though they hadn’t seen me, as though I were here, and yet not here” (301), he says. Once again, the themes of blindness and invisibility are emphasized. Brother Jack tells Emma about the stirring speech the Invisible Man gave at the eviction that moved the crowd to action. Emma questions whether the Invisible Man’s skin is too light for him to be an effective leader. Brother Jack responds by saying, “We’re not interested in his looks but in his voice” (303). The Invisible Man overhears this and is insulted. In a meeting in another room with Brother Jack and some of the other leaders, the Invisible Man learns about the nature of the Brotherhood, a group that is “working for a better world for all the people” (304). Their plan is to make him a leader, “the new Booker T. Washington”

93

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

(305), as Brother Jack puts it. The Invisible Man is given a piece of paper that contains his “new identity” (309). The Brotherhood even gives him a new name. He has been reborn, or at least remade, within the Brotherhood. Emma gives the Invisible Man money for new clothes and the Brotherhood gives him a salary of $60 a week. The Invisible Man realizes that he will have to get rid of all his old clothes and will also have to move. This is part of the construction of his new identity: He sheds his old skin to emerge as something new now that he has accepted the job with the Brotherhood as their new race leader. His old clothes and unimpressive living quarters are not fit for a race leader. This suggests that in order to lead a group of people, one must appear superior to them. Leaving Mary’s In Chapter 15 the Invisible Man hears people banging on the pipes because they want heat. He is annoyed by this and starts banging on the pipes as well, protesting the other tenants’ actions. He becomes so enraged by the banging that he seizes a bank, “the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide mouthed Negro . . . his face an enormous grin. . . . filled to the throat with coins” (319). He begins to bang on the pipes with the bank with such violence that he breaks the bank. He gathers the coins together with the parts of the broken bank in newspaper and stuffs it in his overcoat. He decides to give Mary enough money to cover the loss of the bank, although he cannot understand how she can keep such a hideously racist object. Toys and objects that were lurid exaggerations and comic stereotypes of blacks were very common in the United States until the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when they ceased to be sold. Blacks were frequently used as advertising icons for products ranging from pancake mix to matches. The use of racial stereotypes as advertising ploys has trickled down to the twentyfirst century in brand images such as Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth. 94

Reading Invisible Man

At breakfast, he gives Mary a one-hundred-dollar bill, part of the money he got from Emma the previous evening. Though Mary is reluctant to take so much money, he insists and tells her he won it playing the numbers, an illegal gambling game popular among the lower classes in urban areas from the 1920s through the 1960s. He does not tell Mary the true source of the money. After leaving Mary’s, the Invisible Man tries to get rid of the paper-covered bank. First he puts it in a trash can, but a woman runs out of her house and accuses him of being a “field n----r” (328) who is ruining things for the neighborhood. His actions make the woman see him as inferior; she is unaware that he has been hired to be a race leader. Clearly his actions are not conveying his role. Embarrassed and angry, the Invisible Man removes the package from the trash can and tries to drop it in the street, but “a squat man in worn clothes” (329) runs up to him with the package, thinking the Invisible Man has dropped it accidentally. At first, the Invisible Man tries to deny the package is his. But the man insists that he saw the Invisible Man drop it. The man insults the Invisible Man, calling him a New York Negro, thinking he is a dope peddler or confidence man. Again, the Invisible Man’s actions incite disdain, not admiration, among the people he thinks he should be leading. In truth, the Invisible Man is both a Southern and a New York Negro but not in the way that the woman or the man think. The man and the woman see the problem with black people’s behavior as either rooted in their Southern past or in their Northern present. The black community is further polarized by characterizing blacks by regions, a process that makes the Invisible Man’s role as a leader even more difficult. Speaking at a Rally In chapter 16, Brother Jack and other members of the Brotherhood take the Invisible Man, who is now 95

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

well dressed and living in an apartment on the Upper East Side, to a sports arena in Harlem where a rally is to be held. The imagery of sight and blindness recurs when the Invisible Man looks at an old fight poster of a boxer who was “beaten blind in a crooked fight” at the arena and wound up dying “in a home for the blind” (334). He is in an arena where fights take place to give a speech. He is at war with himself: His grandfather’s legacy, “the traitor self that always threatened internal discord” (335), battles with the Invisible Man’s optimistic belief that if “[he is] successful tonight, [he’ll] be on the road to something big” (335). He has associated success with public oration since he gave the speech at the battle royal. The new clothes and name make him feel different. “I was becoming someone else” (335), he claims. When he and the others finally mount the stage, the Invisible Man is temporarily blinded by the spotlight and falls onto the man in front of him, reminiscent of the blind Homer Barbee tripping on stage when he spoke at the college chapel. Brother Jack stands before the crowd, “like a bemused father listening to the performance of his adoring children” (340). Brother Jack is the latest father figure encountered by the Invisible Man, following Dr. Bledsoe, Mr. Norton, Young Emerson, the crazy veteran, and even Trueblood, the father who violates his daughter. None have been an ideal father figure, making the reader wonder if Brother Jack will also fall short. The speech at the rally is the Invisible Man’s longest. The scene uses sports imagery appropriate to its setting in a sports arena. A voice calls out to the Invisible Man as he begins his speech, “You pitch ’em we catch ’em” (342). The voice in the audience calls each of the Invisible Man’s points a strike, as if he is a baseball umpire. The Invisible Man cannot see his audience, although everyone can see him. The theme of his speech is dispossession, in keeping with the eviction that occurred in an earlier chapter. He employs the imagery of sight when he 96

Reading Invisible Man

says that they all have been dispossessed of one eye and so “can only see in straight white lines” (343), incorporating the pervasive theme of whiteness as well. The Invisible Man concludes that their partial blindness makes them mistake their enemies for one another. He calls for all of them to unite, look out for each other, and stop mistaking the bricks that are thrown at them by others as bricks that they are throwing at each other. The Invisible Man uses a sports metaphor in speaking about catching and throwing the bricks back at those who have thrown them, saying, “I’m good at catching and I’ve got a damn good pitching arm” (344). He ends his speech by telling the audience he now feels more human, that he has found his true family, his true people, his true country. He may be literally blind at the moment, unable to see his audience, but he now has a vision for action. The speech is very well received by the audience. Brother Jack notes that the energy of the crowd must now be organized. “Listen to them. . . . Just waiting to be told what to do” (348). The Invisible Man’s Brotherhood colleagues are far more critical of the speech. They think it is unsatisfactory, “wild, hysterical, politically irresponsible and dangerous” (349). Brother Wrestrum, who becomes one of the Invisible Man’s enemies, calls the speech “backward and reactionary” (350). The speech is also considered too emotional and unscientific. Brother Jack defends the speech, pointing out how effective the Invisible Man was in exciting the crowd. One of the Invisible Man’s critics, Brother Hambro, says that the Invisible Man “must learn to speak scientifically. He must be trained” (351). In effect, the Invisible Man must go back to school, this time under the tutelage of Brother Hambro. A New Life When the Invisible Man gets home, he finds that he is still excited by the success of his speech and what his future 97

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

with the Brotherhood may hold. He is convinced that he has been transformed, that he is no longer the naive college boy, the boy who gave the Booker T. Washington-like speech at the battle royal. “My possibilities were suddenly broadened,” the Invisible Man thinks. “As a Brotherhood spokesman I would represent not only my own group but one that was much larger” (353). The Invisible Man thinks he will be more than just a race leader. This belief was frequently true for African Americans regarding their association with the Communist Party; they were not just assigned to a racial position or confined to speaking only about race. He thinks about his English teacher standing before the class talking about James Joyce’s character Stephen Daedalus: “Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals” (354). This famous quotation emphasizes Ellison’s philosophy of the importance of the individual over the group, that the making of the individual is the making of the group. The Invisible Man now believes he can succeed at something that offers him “the possibility of being more than a member of a race” (355). He can hardly wait to start his work with the Brotherhood. Harlem and Tod Clifton Chapter 17 begins on April Fool’s Day with Brother Jack picking up the Invisible Man and taking him to a Harlem bar. Brother Hambro has been instructing the Invisible Man for four months. He has also been attending Brotherhood rallies, but not making speeches. Brother Jack informs him that Brother Hambro’s reports about him have been very good. He tells the Invisible Man that he is being assigned to Harlem as its chief spokesman. The next day Brother Jack informs the Harlem office that the Invisible Man is their new spokesman. A young 98

Reading Invisible Man

man, “very black and very handsome” (363), arrives late. He is Tod Clifton, the youth leader, and one of the most important characters of the novel. He says he is late because he encountered Ras the Exhorter and some of his followers. Ras is a West Indian Black Nationalist leader who hates the integrationist aims of the Brotherhood and the fact that it is controlled by whites. The Invisible Man finally learns that Ras was the man he saw speaking from a ladder on a street corner when he first arrived in the city. The Brotherhood decides to launch a campaign against evictions by holding street corner rallies. They are prepared for strong resistance from Ras the Exhorter. The Invisible Man observes that everyone in the Harlem office is totally absorbed in the cause. At first he fears Tod Clifton as a possible rival, but learns that Clifton is only interested in furthering the aims of the Brotherhood, telling the Invisible Man that this new campaign will go over “bigger than anything since Garvey” (367), the famous Black Nationalist leader of the early 1920s. It is strange that Clifton should compare the campaign to Garvey, whose philosophy was like that of Ras the Exhorter. At a rally one night, Ras and his men attack the Invisible Man and his group. A fistfight ensues. Ras knocks Clifton down and then threatens him with a knife, but does not stab him because Clifton is black. He then accuses Clifton of being a race traitor because he works with a white organization. Ras asks Clifton to be part of his black movement and urges him not to take the whites’ unclean money. Clifton tries to attack Ras, but the Invisible Man holds him back. When the Invisible Man calls Ras crazy, Ras responds by pointing out how insane it is for three black men to be fighting each other. The Invisible Man thinks back, with some uneasiness, to the battle royal. Clifton looks at Ras “with a tight, fascinated expression” (372) as Ras claims that Clifton is the real black man, a black king. When Ras asks Clifton if he is in 99

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

the Brotherhood to sleep with white women, Clifton lunges at him again, but Ras continues his speech about the need for a pure black organization. Ras does not like the Invisible Man at all and none of his remarks are addressed to him. He thinks the Invisible Man is contaminated by white blood. The Invisible Man warns Ras that the Brotherhood will continue to hold rallies in Harlem. Ras responds by saying that Harlem is the black man’s territory, suggesting that the Invisible Man is not black enough. This concern was also voiced by a member of the Brotherhood when Brother Jack first introduced the Invisible Man. The next morning Brother Tarp gives the Invisible Man a portrait of Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist leader; the Invisible Man remembers his grandfather telling him about Douglass. Ellison compares two historical situations of black and white radicals working together: white and black abolitionists in the nineteenth century and white and black communists in the twentieth century. The Invisible Man is growing ever more famous as a community organizer giving speeches, writing articles, and leading parades. He is now a full-fledged leader. These are his best days with the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man has gone from being a believer in the values of white bourgeois paternalism to being a believer in the values of a working-class revolt against the white bourgeois. Everything is going well.

Chapters 18 through 25 From chapter 18 to the end of the novel, Ellison chronicles the deterioration of the relationship between the Invisible Man and the Brotherhood, resulting in a final violent rupture. At the start of chapter 18, the Invisible Man receives an anonymous letter telling him not to go too fast or the whites will cut him down. This was a common threat that whites—Southern whites in particular— 100

Reading Invisible Man

made against blacks during the years of strictly enforced segregation and the era of the civil rights movement. Even moderately liberal whites believed that social and political change should come gradually and not be rushed or forced; pushing hard for racial equality would not result in any gains. This letter greatly unnerves the Invisible Man. He asks Brother Tarp if he knows where it came from but Brother Tarp doesn’t. He inquires if people in the Brotherhood like him, if he has any enemies. Brother Tarp says everyone likes him and thinks he will be a great leader, and that he has no known enemies. Brother Tarp then goes on to talk about the Brotherhood’s “Rainbow” poster showing American diversity: an American Indian couple, “a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister” and Tod Clifton and a white couple “surrounded by a group of children of mixed races” (385). The pictures represent the dispossessed past, the dispossessed present, and the future without dispossession. At first, Brother Tarp explains, some members opposed the Invisible Man’s idea for the poster, but later came to embrace it fervently. Brother Tarp then proceeds to tell the Invisible Man his story about serving nineteen years on a southern chain gang because of an argument he had with a white man. He lost his wife, children, and land. He became friends with the guard dogs over the years and one day, when the river flooded the area, Brother Tarp broke his chain and left. The guards thought he drowned in the flood. Brother Tarp unwraps an object—a chain link—and gives it to the Invisible Man as a good luck talisman. It is a way for the Invisible Man to be linked to the ancestry of his blackness. He remembers his own past as if “[he]’d plunged down a well of years” (390); once again Ellison uses the image of falling down a hole. Talking with Brother Tarp restores the Invisible Man’s confidence. He regains his belief that the Brotherhood is the one place in America where a black man is given “the greatest encouragement to use [his] abilities” (391). 101

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Trouble with Wrestrum Later, Brother Wrestrum, a busybody who does not like the Invisible Man, comes in to see him. He is taken aback when he sees Brother Tarp’s chain link on the Invisible Man and tells him that he thinks the link is divisive because it emphasizes differences between people, which is against the principles of the Brotherhood. Brother Tarp himself had emphasized this point. Brother Wrestrum tells the Invisible Man that everyone in the Brotherhood must be watchful about what they do and say, so they do not harm the movement. Brother Wrestrum is on the lookout for the disloyal, those who use the Brotherhood for their own selfish ends. “The business of being a brother is a full-time job” (394), he says. “You have to be pure in heart and you have to be disciplined in body and mind” (394). This is all a thinly veiled warning to the Invisible Man. Brother Wrestrum suggests that the Brotherhood needs a flag, an emblem by which they can be identified. A flag would prevent the recurrence of a prior incident, when some white hoodlums tried to break up a Brotherhood rally and Clifton began to beat up one of the white Brotherhood members, mistaking him for one of the hoodlums. Although Brother Wrestrum is against emphasizing difference, he wants an emblem that will, ironically, make the members of the Brotherhood stand out. A magazine editor calls asking for an interview with the Invisible Man. At first, the Invisible Man says no, describing himself as “a cog in a machine” (396), the same imagery used by Brockway at Liberty Paints and by Mr. Norton when he is in the car with the Invisible Man. He eventually consents to the interview, which Brother Wrestrum uses as grounds to accuse the Invisible Man of being an opportunist. The Invisible Man swears he has never seen the published interview. He acknowledges doing the interview and reminds the other members that Brother Wrestrum was in the room at the time he consented to it. He reminds Westrum that he even suggested 102

Reading Invisible Man

that the reporter interview Tod Clifton instead. Brother Wrestrum accuses the Invisible Man of wanting to be a dictator, of having the Harlem masses personally enthralled to him. “He works in the dark” (401), Brother Wrestrum says. Earlier in the novel Dr. Bledsoe had advised the Invisible Man to “get [him]self power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people—then stay in the dark and use it” (145). Brother Wrestrum is accusing the Invisible Man of doing exactly what Dr. Bledsoe urged him to do. Brother Wrestrum wants the Invisible Man thrown out of the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man angrily calls Brother Wrestrum a liar and scoundrel. He does not offer a defense as he feels that the magazine article served to advertise the Brotherhood. This argument is yet another example of black men fighting each other, creating a stalemate in the struggle for racial equality. The committee deliberates and decides the Invisible Man is innocent of any wrongdoing with the article. But Brother Jack decides that until he is cleared of all other charges, the Invisible Man must give up his Harlem office and go downtown to lecture on the Woman Question. The Invisible Man resigns himself to his new assignment. He even begins to feel more optimistic. Why should he speak only to blacks or only be concerned with race? The fact that the Brotherhood was willing for him to go downtown to speak to white women on the Woman Question was an affirmation of Brotherhood’s principles and their faith in him. In some ways, the Invisible Man still thinks like the immature young man the reader met at the beginning of the novel. He does not suspect people of having ulterior motives. In chapter 19, a wealthy married white woman seduces the Invisible Man when he begins lecturing on the Woman Question. Ellison’s idea of women seems clearly sexist; women are never shown as being interested in tough political or intellectual issues, nor are they ever 103

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

shown in leadership positions. The Invisible Man says, “Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically” (418). The Invisible Man, and perhaps Ellison, blames women for hindering racial equality. After spending considerable time downtown, the Invisible Man is called to attend an emergency meeting at the Brotherhood headquarters. Brother Jack informs him at the meeting that Tod Clifton has disappeared. He is also told that he must go back to Harlem because Ras the Exhorter has taken over. The Invisible Man must regain the Brotherhood’s strength in Harlem. Sambo Dolls and Clifton’s Death As chapter 20 opens, the reader finds the Invisible Man back in Harlem. He enters Barrelhouse’s Jolly Dollar, “[a] dark hole of a bar and grill on upper Eighth Avenue” (423), looking for Brother Maceo, who is not there. He is greeted with hostility by the patrons. The Invisible Man learns that some in Harlem consider him a sellout or traitor for having left to go downtown. The Invisible Man also learns that after his reassignment, the Brotherhood no longer agitated on behalf of black people. He looks for Brother Tarp at the Harlem office, but finds his room empty and the portrait of Frederick Douglass gone. The Invisible Man tries calling Tod Clifton to no avail. He falls asleep in the office. In the morning, he learns that things changed as a result of a new directive that instructed the Harlem office to stop agitating about local issues, but instead to emphasize national and international concerns. Harlemites lost interest in the Brotherhood as a result. No one has any idea what has happened to Tod Clifton. As time passes, the Invisible Man becomes more concerned. He phones headquarters but cannot reach anyone.

104

Reading Invisible Man

He decides to go to headquarters but discovers that the leaders are in a meeting. He runs into a friend of Clifton’s who seems to be acting as a lookout for a man talking to a crowd. The man ignores the Invisible Man’s greeting and picks up a large carton. The Invisible Man turns his attention to what the crowd is watching: a doll. A voice spouts a jingle to accompany the dancing doll, whose name, the reader discovers, is Sambo. Sambo was a derogatory term for a black male, a stereotype that was meant to denote someone comic, grinning, and lazy. The Invisible Man feels as though he has “waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head” (432) when he sees the Sambo doll dancing. Once again, Ellison uses an image of plunging and falling. He is shocked to recognize Tod Clifton as the operator and salesman. The Invisible Man spits on the doll, angering the crowd. Clifton’s lookout tells him a policeman is on the way, so he drops his dolls into the carton, telling people to follow him around the corner. One of the dolls falls on the street and the Invisible Man is about to crush it but a woman cries out. Instead, he puts the doll in his pocket where he also has Brother Tarp’s link. The Invisible Man is stunned. He cannot figure out what has happened to change Clifton in this way. The Invisible Man walks a block or two and sees Clifton being confronted by a police officer who is apparently placing him under arrest. The policeman and Clifton have an altercation after the officer pushes Clifton. Clifton knocks the policeman to the ground and the officer shoots him, killing him instantly. The Invisible Man tries to go to Clifton but the officer signals him away. He tries again and the policeman, joined by two others, becomes more insistent. The Invisible Man goes down to catch a subway train, symbolically a plunge underground. He tries to figure out

105

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

why Clifton turned his back on the Brotherhood and reduced himself to selling Sambo dolls. He sees three boys on the platform with conked, or straightened, hair; this style imitated white people’s hair by removing the tight curls in African-American hair. For the Invisible Man, it is as if he is seeing these men for the first time, men who are “outside of historical time” (440). The Invisible Man feels that he has been asleep during the time he was in the Brotherhood. A Funeral for Clifton Chapter 21 begins with the Invisible Man back at his Harlem office, berating himself for not having handled the situation with Clifton better. He feels that he has “lost [his] head . . . and acted personally instead of . . . seizing the opportunity to educate the crowd” (445). The Invisible Man reconsiders his actions: He should not have spit on the doll, and he should have punched Clifton, to “try to break his jaw” (446). “Why didn’t you hurt him and save him?” (446) he asks himself. The Invisible Man thinks that had he been violent with Clifton he would have been able to save him from his apparent disillusionment. This contrasts with the previous examples in the novel where a black man fighting a black man accomplishes nothing. He fools around with the Sambo doll that he pulls from his pocket and discovers that Clifton actually manipulated it by using a black thread that was invisible. He decides to give Clifton a public funeral. Despite the fact that he was selling Sambo dolls, he was still an unarmed black man shot down by a white police officer. The Invisible Man tries to get in touch with the Brotherhood headquarters but cannot. He calls the Harlem leaders together and they plan Clifton’s funeral. They solicit funds on the street and are able to hold the funeral in Mount Morris Park on a Saturday. The funeral oration for Tod Clifton is the last speech the Invisible Man

106

Reading Invisible Man

gives. At first, he tells mourners to go home because he has nothing to say. He then gets into the rhythm of his speech, saying Tod Clifton’s name at regular intervals as he recounts the little he knows about the deceased: he was young, he was shot by a white policeman, he died, and he had tried to achieve brotherhood on the streets. The Invisible Man tells the crowd it is an all-too-familiar story. He states that Clifton forgot his inferior racial status, that he “thought he was a man and that men were not meant to be pushed around” (457). He depicts the murder of Clifton as an unreal situation: “It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world” (457–458). At the time that Invisible Man was published, children and adolescents reading comic books was a major concern in the United States largely because of the graphic violence. The Invisible Man ends his speech saying, “His name was Tod Clifton, he believed in Brotherhood, he aroused our hopes, and he died” (459). Tod Clifton literally wound up underground. After the funeral, the Invisible Man walks through Harlem sensing the tension beneath the scene of ordinary urban life. He thinks something is about to happen. Chapter 22 starts with the Invisible Man attending a downtown meeting with the Brotherhood’s leadership. They ask him how the funeral went, but there is clearly something in the air and it becomes apparent that they are not pleased. The Invisible Man says that he was unable to get in touch with the committee and proceeded on his “personal responsibility” (463). The use of this expression elicits a response from Brother Jack that is similar to the response the Invisible Man got when he said “social equality” instead of “social responsibility” when he gave his battle royal speech. Though the Invisible Man called himself “one of the most irresponsible beings that ever

107

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

lived” (14) in the prologue, he is now confidently taking responsibility for an action he believes was right. The other members are sarcastic and talk to the Invisible Man as if he were nothing more than an undisciplined, egotistical, petit bourgeois pseudo-intellectual. The Brotherhood leadership thinks it was wrong to give a public funeral to a black traitor who sold demeaning merchandise. The Invisible Man demands to know what constitutes a traitor. He raises the point that some consider him a traitor because he went downtown to talk about the Woman Question and that others might consider him a traitor because he did not get involved in politics. The Invisible Man feels that the whites in the room are setting themselves as authorities on the character and habits of black people. The white members of the Brotherhood feel the Invisible Man is being too obsessed with race, a frequent complaint even liberal or leftist whites have made against blacks. The Invisible Man is particularly criticized by Brother Tobitt, and the two men nearly come to blows. Brother Jack reminds the Invisible Man that he was “not hired to think” (469); the committee does all the thinking, and the Invisible Man is supposed to serve as its mouthpiece. The Invisible Man insists that they must all be aware of the complexities of African-American life. However, Brother Jack sees blacks as a raw material that must be harnessed and developed. He says at one point, “Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them” (473). When the Invisible Man joined the Brotherhood he was trying to break free of whites’ expectations and create an acceptable identity for African Americans, but he now realizes that even the Brotherhood wants to control black minds as they see fit. The Invisible Man accuses Brother Jack of being the “great white father” (473), reprising the recurring theme of fatherhood. The Invisible Man hurls an insult at Brother Jack, who responds by rising from his seat and 108

Reading Invisible Man

sputtering in a foreign language. Brother Jack’s glass eye falls onto the table. The recurring theme of sight reveals the Brotherhood’s leader as literally a one-eyed jack, only partly able to see reality: “He doesn’t even see me. . . . See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness” (475). Brother Jack lost his eye for the Brotherhood. The argument with Brother Jack ends amicably. He tells the Invisible Man to go to Brother Hambro for instructions about what to do next. The Invisible Man now feels he has changed again and “won’t ever look the same, or feel the same. I couldn’t go back to what I was— which wasn’t much—but I’d lost too much to be what I was” (478). Becoming Rinehart In Chapter 23, the Invisible Man walks the streets of Harlem, where everyone is talking about the death of Clifton. He is confronted by Ras the Exhorter and accused of being a traitor. But the Invisible Man bests Ras rhetorically, telling the gathered crowd that Ras is merely exploiting the tragedy for his own ends. Ras is booed from his ladder, but his henchmen follow the Invisible Man. He spots three men wearing dark glasses. Inspired, he goes into a store and buys a pair of glasses so dark he can barely see. He hopes the glasses will serve as a disguise. Here is another instance of the theme of sight and vision in the novel, specifically the use of partial blindness as a symbol. While wearing the dark glasses at night, the Invisible Man cannot see well and what he sees is distorted. He can see nothing clearly: “the world took on a dark-green intensity . . . , faces were a mysterious blur” (484). People see him differently too. A woman wearing a tight dress approaches him, calling him Rinehart, asking him about the hat she bought him for Christmas. She instantly recognizes that she has made a mistake, but her question gives him an idea for further concealment. He decides to buy a hat, to improve his disguise. 109

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

He walks back to Ras’s meeting spot, but no one recognizes him. Two men approach and call him Rinehart. He wonders who Rinehart is, but is thrilled to be taken for someone else. Meanwhile, Ras the Exhorter announces that he intends to “become Ras the DESTROYER” (487), saying the time has come for action. Another character has achieved an identity change, but one very different from the Invisible Man’s. The Invisible Man goes into the Jolly Dollar unrecognized. Everyone seems to think he is some sort of hustler, a confidence man, a man who lives by his wits. Finally, he spies Brother Maceo, whom he had been looking for when he first came back to Harlem. He tries out his disguise and it is successful. Brother Maceo is hostile to him, thinking he is about to pull a knife. The confrontation becomes dangerous and the Invisible Man finds himself trapped in his role. Barrelhouse breaks it up by threatening both men with a pistol. Barrelhouse calls the Invisible Man Rinehart, and tells him to leave. The Invisible Man has several encounters as he walks the street in his disguise. Everyone thinks he is someone called Rinehart, but everyone has a different idea of who Rinehart is. The Invisible Man finally removes the glasses and the hat. How could Rinehart be so many things, the prince of all the invisible darkness that surrounds the visible world? The Invisible Man concludes that beneath the world we construct, the illusions by which we live— whether they are bourgeois values, radical leftist values, history, religion, or simply a striving for power and wealth—there is nothing but chaos and meaninglessness. Indeed, everything we do is an attempt to disguise the chaos. He goes to Brother Hambro’s, putting the glasses in his pocket with Brother Tarp’s link and Clifton’s doll. He hopes that Brother Hambro can explain Rinehart, but he decides that he cannot, that Brother Hambro would only see him as a criminal. Brother Hambro is clearly the most admirable person in the Brotherhood; he is described as “almost Lincolnesque” (503). He is the only person in the 110

Reading Invisible Man

Brotherhood with a family. Indeed, his family is one of the very few depicted in the novel. But even Brother Hambro has his shortcomings. He explains that the Harlem district has to be sacrificed as new directives have come down from Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Union that the Brotherhood must have outreach with other groups. A New Strategy The Invisible Man realizes that the leaders of the Brotherhood fight for causes, not for individuals, and they sacrifice whatever is necessary to remain in power as leaders. “Only in the Brotherhood had there seemed a chance for [African Americans]” (507), and even that was a façade since none of the white brothers actually comprehend what life is like for a black man. “I now recognized my invisibility,” says the Invisible Man. This time, however, he vows to “accept it [and] explore it” (508), manipulating his invisibility—his nonexistence as an individual man—to work against the Brotherhood. After all, he reasons, “Would this be treachery? Did the word apply to an invisible man?” (509). He laments the fact that blacks have no allies, only those “who saw us as more than convenient tools for shaping their own desires,” like the leaders of the Brotherhood. He decides, “If I couldn’t help them to see the reality of our lives I would help them to ignore it until it exploded in their faces” (511). Now, he finds that he is being forced “to fight them in the dark” (511), a return to the advice originally given by Dr. Bledsoe. He decides he will seduce Emma, Brother Jack’s mistress, in order to get information. The Invisible Man begins to put his new strategy into play in chapter 24. Harlem seems on the verge of exploding. The Brotherhood begins a community clean-up campaign. He fakes membership cards to show the Brotherhood leadership that things are going along well 111

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

and that the community is involved. He changes his mind about seducing Emma and decides to target another woman, Sybil, whom he knew from his days as a lecturer on the Woman Question. She is the wife of a Brotherhood leader and is lonely, so he considers her vulnerable to a sexual approach. He tries to seduce her on a hot August night at his apartment. Ellison’s selection of this date is significant. The Harlem Riot started on August 2, 1943, after a white policeman shot a black serviceman in the shoulder following a scuffle. Rumors circulated in Harlem that the serviceman had been killed. Ellison drew on actual facts to bolster his fictionalized version of events for his novel. This is one of the few times an actual date is referenced. The Invisible Man decides to use Sybil as a tool, reasoning that “her unhappiness and the fact that she was one of the big shots’ wives made her a perfect choice” (516). Although she thinks of him in terms of black stereotypes—a rapist and an entertainer—she is also a sympathetic figure. She is drunk and bordering on middle age; she begs him to be a “big black bruiser” (522) and ravage her. She calls the Invisible Man “boo’ful” (beautiful) (523), a punning joke on Ellison’s part, suggesting that the Invisible Man is a spook in both senses of the word; ghosts are invisible and spook was a derogatory word for blacks. However, he cannot go through with it: “Such games were for Rinehart, not me” (523). He pretends to rape her and convinces her that he has. Then he prods her for information but finds that she has little actual interest in politics and can tell him nothing. Clearly, the lesson learned by the Invisible Man here is that if one adopts the morality of one’s enemies, one is no better than one’s enemies. Sybil’s phone rings and the Invisible Man answers. The person on the other end tells him that there is “bad trouble” (526), so he grabs the briefcase that he was given at the battle royal, and attempts to put Sybil in a cab. 112

Reading Invisible Man

She gets out of the first cab and runs after him. He finally succeeds with a second cab, whose driver informs him that a riot has broken out in Harlem. As he approaches Harlem, he runs under a bridge and is showered with bird droppings. Race Riot Chapter 25 is devoted to describing the chaos of the riot. The Invisible Man is grazed by a bullet and is aided by two men, Dupre and Scofield, who are out looting. The Invisible Man holds on desperately to his briefcase through it all. He takes all his belongings and puts them in the briefcase: the broken bank, the Sambo doll, his Brotherhood identification, and the anonymous letter he received warning him not to go too fast. The riot is both frightening and liberating for the Invisible Man. The Invisible Man helps Dupre, Scofield, and their friends rob a building and set it ablaze. Then, Dupre and Scofield begin to shoot at the police in what has become a fullscale race war. In horror, the Invisible Man realizes that the leadership of the Brotherhood instigated the riot as a way to put an end to their Harlem commitment, to have the people release their energy in self-destructive violence. He understands that he has inadvertently helped them achieve this end. He encounters Ras the Destroyer “upon a great black horse . . . dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain” (556). He is a misguided throwback to some romanticized version of black people’s African past. He tries to adopt his Rinehart disguise but when he takes his sunglasses from his briefcase, he discovers that the lenses have been crushed. Ras flings a spear at the Invisible Man but misses, hitting one of the “lynched” white dummies hanging from a lamppost. The Invisible Man tries to convince Ras that the Brotherhood wanted to use this violence for propaganda purposes. Once again, as elsewhere in the novel, black men are fighting black men at the instigation 113

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

THE

RIOT THAT TAKES PLACE TOWARD THE END OF INVISIBLE

BASED ON THE RIOT THAT TOOK PLACE IN

114

HARLEM

IN

1943.

MAN

IS

Reading Invisible Man

of whites. Ras will not listen. The Invisible Man throws the spear at Ras and it rips through his cheeks. The Invisible Man fights off Ras’s henchmen and runs, in the hope of reaching Mary Rambo’s. As he flees, he realizes that his grandfather had been wrong about his philosophy of “yessing” the whites; to be a tool is to become a tool, whether one does it consciously or unconsciously, whether one does it sincerely or cynically. In realizing this, he decides to hunt for Brother Jack. Some white plainclothes policemen stop him, wanting to know what he is carrying in his briefcase. He runs from them only to wind up falling down an uncovered manhole into a coal bin. He taunts the officers, then settles into the darkness as they drop the manhole cover in place. Life Underground After awakening from sleep, the Invisible Man finds that he cannot get out of the hole in the darkness. He finds some matches. He has no paper, so he decides to burn the papers he has in his briefcase: first, his high school diploma, but the flame is too weak. Clifton’s doll “burned so stubbornly” (568) that he chooses the anonymous letter, which burned quickly. He immediately burns his Brotherhood identity and discovers that Brother Jack had written them both. When he realizes this, that Brother Jack had deceived him in a way that was similar to what Dr. Bledsoe had done, the Invisible Man has a breakdown, screaming in a rage. This goes on for a long time, possibly days or weeks, as the Invisible Man “plunged against some kind of partition and sailed headlong, coughing and sneezing, into another dimensionless room” (568). He falls into a dream or delirium, where he imagines that he is the prisoner of “Jack and old Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton and Ras and the school superintendent and a number of others whom I failed to recognize, but all of whom had run me” (569). What Ellison seems

115

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

to be suggesting is that the world of the bourgeois capitalist and the leftist radical is one of power obsession, lies, castration, and egotistical masculine conflict. The Invisible Man recovers and discovers that he cannot go home or back to any aspect of his old life, now that he is free of his illusions. He remains underground where he can “try to think things out” (571).

Epilogue The Invisible Man realizes he cannot return to the world of conformist affirmation. He has affirmed mistaken beliefs; he was loved by his friends, but he was dishonest to himself. Since the Invisible Man has discovered that to live in the world of illusion and conformity was to live “in everyone’s way but [his] own” (573), he gives it up. He retreats to his cellar. He is still trying to figure out the meaning of his grandfather’s deathbed proclamations and decides that perhaps he meant “we [African Americans] were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men” (574). Or perhaps the grandfather meant “we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the men as well as the principle” (574). The Invisible Man considers that he has gone through both phases: being for the country and then being against it. The Invisible Man’s world is now “one of infinite possibilities” (576). The Invisible Man’s new outlook enables him to “better understand [his] relation to [the world] and it to me” (576). Finally, the Invisible Man affirms the principle of diversity, of America as a country “woven of many strands” (577). This portion of the epilogue sounds very contemporary, very much in the spirit of today’s multiculturalism. The Invisible Man then recalls that he had recently seen Mr. Norton in the subway. He appeared lost. He asked the Invisible Man how to get to Centre Street, but Mr. Norton

116

Reading Invisible Man

seems to be asking, literally, how to get to the middle of the road. Mr. Norton doesn’t remember the Invisible Man. The Invisible Man brings up the Golden Day and asks him if he is ashamed. Mr. Norton becomes angry and a little alarmed, thinking the Invisible Man is crazy. The Invisible Man asks himself why he has written down all that has happened to him. But he feels he must tell at least a few people. The writing seems to have activated a need to return to the world, to return to action. He declares his hibernation over and plans to leave the cave, admitting “that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (581).

117

Works

Novels 1952 1999

Invisible Man Juneteenth: A Novel, edited by John F. Callahan

Essay Collections 1964 1986 1995

Shadow and Act Going to the Territory The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan

Interviews and Letters 1995 2000

Conversations with Ralph Ellison, edited by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan Flying Home and Other Stories (1996), edited by John F. Callahan Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (2001), edited by Robert G. O’Meally

118

Filmography

Ralph Ellison: An American Journey. Dir. Avon Kirkland. New Images Productions, Inc., in association with Thirteen/WNET New York. 2002.

119

Chronology

1913 March 1:

1916 June: July 19:

Ralph Waldo Ellison is born in Oklahoma City to Lewis Alfred Ellison, a selfemployed ice and coal dealer, and Ida Millsap Ellison.

Ellison’s brother, Herbert, is born. Lewis Ellison dies at the age of thirty-nine as a result of an injury sustained in an accident while delivering ice.

1919

Ralph begins the first grade at the Frederick Douglass School in Oklahoma City.

1921

Ida moves to Gary, Indiana, with Ralph and Herbert, but returns the same year to Oklahoma City.

1922

Ellison begins to study the trumpet with music teacher Zelia Breaux.

1930–1931

Ellison achieves first-chair trumpet in the Frederick Douglass School orchestra. Because of some failing grades, Ellison does not graduate with his class, although he is permitted to participate in the ceremony.

120

Chronology

1933

1936 July 5: 1937

Ellison enters Tuskegee University as a music student on a scholarship.

Ellison arrives in New York. Ellison meets Richard Wright. He publishes a review of Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds and writes his first short story, “Hymie’s Bull.” Ellison’s mother, Ida, dies in a Dayton, Ohio, hospital on October 16. He begins a novel called Slick.

1938

Ellison leaves Dayton and returns to New York. He meets actress/dancer Rose Poindexter; they marry on September 17. Ellison gets a job with the Federal Writers’ Project, which lasts till 1942. He writes his first review for New Masses of Sojourner Truth: God’s Faithful Pilgrim by Arthur Huff Fauset.

1939

Ellison publishes first short story, entitled “Slick Gonna Learn,” in Direction.

1940

Richard Wright publishes Native Son, one of his most important, best-selling novels. Ellison defends the novel against critics.

121

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

1941

Ellison is classified 1A—eligible for military service. He becomes the managing editor of The Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture until 1943, when the magazine ceases publication.

1943

Ellison joins the Merchant Marine as a third cook in September. He is reclassified 2A, ineligible for the draft, after getting sick while on a voyage returning from Wales.

1944

He publishes two short stories: “Flying Home,” in an anthology entitled Cross Section, and “King of the Bingo Game,” in Tomorrow. The Antioch Review publishes “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ellison’s review of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

1945

Ellison begins writing Invisible Man. Ellison wins a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship; it is extended in 1946. He and Rose Poindexter divorce.

1946 August 28: 1947

He marries Fanny McConnell. The first chapter of Invisible Man is published in Horizon.

122

Chronology

1952

1953 January 27:

“Invisible Man: Prologue to a Novel” is published in Partisan Review; Invisible Man follows on April 14.

Invisible Man is awarded the National Book Award.

1954

Ellison receives the Rockefeller Foundation Award.

1955

Ellison wins the Prix de Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The essay “Living With Music” is published in High Fidelity.

1958

“Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” is published in Partisan Review; “The Charlie Christian Story,” his first essay on jazz, appears in Saturday Review.

1963

“The World and the Jug,” a response to Irving Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons,” is published in The New Leader.

1964

Shadow and Act, a collection of essays and interviews, is released.

1965

The short story “Juneteenth” is published in Quarterly Review of Literature.

123

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

1965

Invisible Man is selected the Best American Novel of the post–World War II era in a Book Week poll of leading American critics.

1967

A fire at his Massachusetts summer home destroys a significant portion of the manuscript of Ellison’s second novel.

1969

Ellison receives the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, from President Lyndon B. Johnson.

1970

He is appointed the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University, a position he holds until 1980. Ellison is awarded the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et Lettres by André Malraux, Minister of Cultural Affairs in France and one of Ellison’s intellectual heroes.

1975

He is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1977

Ellison’s short story “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator” is published in Massachusetts Review; his essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” appears in The American Scholar.

1982

He becomes professor emeritus at New York University.

124

Chronology

1986 1994 April 16:

Going to the Territory, a collection of essays, is released. Ellison dies in New York City of pancreatic cancer.

1995

John Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor, arranges for the publication of Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.

1996

“Flying Home” and Other Stories, a collection of several of Ellison’s important short stories, is published at the direction of Callahan.

1999

Callahan arranges for Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth, to be published from Ellison’s manuscripts.

125

Notes

Introduction p. 7, par. 1, Harold Isaacs, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, edited by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 67. p. 8, par. 4, Alan Chester and Vilma Howard, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 8.

Chapter 1 p. 11, par. 2, W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995), 25. p. 11, par. 3, Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1987), 109–110. p. 13, par. 4, Quoted in Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002), 20. p. 14, par. 2, “‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph Ellison,” in Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Hersey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 273–274. p. 16, pars. 1–2, Ralph Ellison, “On Being the Target of Discrimination,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 824–825. p. 16, par. 3, Quoted in Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 35. 126

Notes

p. 17, par. 3, Ralph Ellison, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview,” by Richard Wright, in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 5–6. p. 18, par. 1, Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 42. p. 19, par. 2, Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 190–191. p. 22, par. 1, Ellison, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure” in Shadow and Act, 10. p. 22, par. 1, Ellison, “Living with Music,” in Shadow and Act, 189. p. 22, par. 2, Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, and Steve Cannon, “The Essential Ellison,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 345. p. 23, par. 2, For more on the difference between campus life at white and black universities, see Raymond Wolters, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). p. 23, par. 2, Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2007), 60. p. 23, par. 2, Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, 6. p. 24, par. 1, Albert Murray and John F. Callahan, Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 20. p. 24, par. 2, Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 122. p. 25, par. 2, Richard Kostelanetz, “An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Conservations with Ralph Ellison, 87–88. p. 26, par. 2, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 354. p. 26, par. 3, Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, 78. 127

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

p. 27, par. 1, Ellison, Invisible Man, 117–133. p. 27, par. 2, Ellison, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure” in Shadow and Act, 14 p. 28, par. 1, Ellison, Invisible Man, 159–160. p. 30, par. 3, Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, 170. p. 32, par. 2, Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright,” in Going to the Territory, 216. p. 33, par. 1, Hollie I. West, “Ellison: Exploring the Life of a Not So Visible Man,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 255. p. 33, pars. 2–4, Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act, 83. p. 34, par. 3, Alan Chester and Vilma Howard, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 7. p. 36, par. 4, See William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 163 and Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 295. p. 37, par. 5, Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, 205. p. 38, par. 3, Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography, 204. p. 39, par. 4, American Scholar, “What’s Wrong with the American Novel,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 48. p. 42, par. 2, John Corry, “An American Novelist Who Sometimes Teaches,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 101.

128

Notes

Chapter 2 p. 47, par. 1, Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1987), 111. p. 51, par. 2, Alan Chester and Vilma Howard, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 18. p. 51, par. 2, Harold Isaacs, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors,” in Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 66. p. 55, par. 2, Quoted in Martin Bauml Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 342. p. 58, par. 2, LeRoi Jones, “State/Meant,” in Home; Social Essays (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1966), 252. p. 58, par. 4–p. 59, par. 1, Graham and Singh, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, 236–237. p. 60, par. 3, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 577.

Chapter 3 All text citations come from Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995). p. 63, par. 1 Richard Kostelanetz, “An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” in Conservations with Ralph Ellison, 75.

129

pter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a ber of a hard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His ndfather advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by ling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overe ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide n.” It was shocking advice that becomes something of “a curse” he Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to understand it. was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is speaking up that bles change. Chapter 1 opens with the Invisible Man explainthat he is a member of a hard-working family that “stayed in place.” His grandfather advocated this philosophy on his thbed by telling the Invisible Man’s father that he had “been raitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He ised his son, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit ust wide open.” It was shocking advice that becomes something a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is never quite able to erstand it. He was advised to keep quiet when, in fact, it is aking up that enables change. Chapter 1 opens with the isible Man explaining that he is a member of a hard-working ily that “stayed in its place.” His grandfather advocated s philosophy on his deathbed by telling the Invisible Man’s her that he had “been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the my’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with your head in the n’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em h grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller till they vomit or bust wide open.” It was shocking advice t becomes something of “a curse” to the Invisible Man, as he is er quite able to understand it. He was advised to keep quiet n, in fact, it is speaking up that enables change. Chapter 1 ns with the Invisible Man explaining that he is a member of ard-working family that “stayed in its place.” His grandfar advocated this philosophy on his deathbed by telling the isible Man’s father that he had “been a traitor all my born s, a spy in the enemy’s country.” He advised his son, “Live with r head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with es, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destrucn, let ’em swoller you till they130 vomit or bust wide open.” It was cking advice that becomes something of “a curse” to the

Further Information

Further Reading Callahan, John F., ed. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John, Wiley & Sons, 2002. Posnock, Ross, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2007. Tracy, Steven C., ed. A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Websites African American Literature Book Club: Ralph Ellison biography page http://aalbc.com/authors/ellison.htm The Paris Review: Interview with Ralph Ellison http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMI D/5053 Ralph Ellison: An American Journey http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ellison_r_homepage.html

131

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Burke, Bob, and Denyvetta Davis. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2003. Callahan, John F., ed. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: The Modern Library, 1995. ———, ed. Flying Home and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1998. ———, ed. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Vintage, 1995. ———. Invisible Man. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. Juneteenth: A Novel. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1999. ———. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. Edited by Robert G. O’Meally. New York: Modern Library, 2002. ———. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1972.

132

Bibliography

Graham, Maryemma, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Hersey, John, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John, Wiley & Sons, 2002. Morel, Lucas E., ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to “Invisible Man.” Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Murray, Albert, and John F. Callahan, eds. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. New York: Vintage, 2001. Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. O’Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———. New Essays on “Invisible Man”. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Posnock, Ross, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2007. Sundquist, Eric. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1995.

133

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Tracy, Steven C., ed. A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Warren, Kenneth W. So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press , 2003. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wright, John S. Shadowing Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

134

Index Page numbers in boldface are illustrations, tables, and charts. Proper names of fictional characters are shown by (C).

abolitionist, 100 Adelphi University, 40 African American, 37, 42, 83 food stereotype symbols, 89 identity, 60, 86–87 life choices, 11, 15 migration from south to north, 38, 78 patriotism, 55 poverty line and, 52 racial traits, 26 style, 11 African American arts, 8, 42, 44, 50 African art, 44 alienation theme, 70 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 9, 39, 123, 124 American Communist movement, 52 American literature black writers, 57–58, 61 major contemporary themes, 56 Antioch Review, 37, 122 Apollo Theater, 28 Armstrong, Louis, 46, 48 art, meaning of, 22 Atlanta Compromise speech, 71 Atlantic Monthly, 36 Austen, Jane, 25 Avery Chapel AME Church, 16 Back to Africa movement, 29 “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator,” 42, 124

Baker, Josephine, 48 Baldwin, James, 57, 58 Baraka, Amiri, 42, 58, 59. See also LeRoi Jones. Barbee, Homer A. (C), 27, 65, 75, 96 Bard College, 40 Barrelhouse (C), 104, 110 Barthé, Richmond, 30 Basie, Count, 21, 21, 31 Bates, Amelie, 35 Bates, John, 35 battle royal sequence, 70–72, 96, 98, 99, 107, 112 Beat writers, 58, 59 Bebop, 56 Beetlecreek, 58 Best American Novel, 40, 123 “The Birthmark,” 37 Black Arts Movement, 8, 42, 58 “The Black Ball,” 35 black boxers, 22, 70, 72, 96 Black Boy, 32, 36, 37, 122 black culture/folk music, 19, 23, 24, 32, 55 Ellison’s childhood exposure to, 18 intertwined with Western tradition, 37, 38–39 in Invisible Man, 86, 89, 101 black culture symbols, 90 black elite symbolism, 87 black magazines, 48, 51 black man fighting black man example, 103, 106 black music, 47

135

Black Nationalism, 28, 29, 51, 58, 60 in Invisible Man, 63, 66, 79, 99 black newspapers, 48 black stereotypes, 70, 112 derogatory words, 112 symbols of, 89, 94, 105 black “territory” bands, 21 Bledsoe, Dr. (C), 28, 64–65, 75–82, 76, 88–89, 91, 96, 103, 111, 115 blindness/clear vision theme, 68, 70, 79, 82, 93, 96, 97, 109 Breaux, Zelia N., 16, 17, 120 briefcase symbol, 72, 112–113, 115 Brockway, Lucius (C), 65, 83–85, 102 Brontë, Emily, 25 Brooklyn Dodgers, 52, 54 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 56 The Brotherhood (C), 63–64, 66–67, 88, 92–95, 97–98, 99–104, 106–113, 115 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 51 Burke, Kenneth, 37 Buster (C), 40

Civil Rights Act of 1964, 59 civil rights legislation, 59, 60 civil rights movement, 8, 45, 58, 94, 101 Clarke, Kenny, 56 classical music, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 28 Clifton, Tod (C), 67, 98–100, 101–107, 110, 115 Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 45, 118, 125 College of William and Mary, 40 comic books, 107 Common Ground, 37 Communism, 7, 30, 33–34, 37, 51–52 Communist Party, 30, 34, 36, 63, 66, 88, 93, 98, 111 Congress of the World Partisans of Peace, 55 Corso, Gregory, 58 “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” 40 crazy veteran (C), 74, 78–79, 96 The Crisis magazine, 48, 51 cross-cultural racial exchange, 17–18, 26, 32–33, 48, 59, 60 in Invisible Man, 81, 83 Cross Section, 35, 122 Cullen, Countee, 48

“Cadillac Flambe,” 42 Callahan, John F., 45, 118, 125 Carver, George Washington, 15 Catlett, Elizabeth, 44 Challenge, 33 Chevalier de L’Ordre des Artes et Lettres, 32, 124 Chicago, University of, 40 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 24 Christian, Charlie, 19

Daedalus, Stephen (C), 98 Daily Worker, 33 Davis, Henry “Hoolie,” 17, 18 Davis, Miles, 56 Dawson, William, 23, 24, 28 Deep South, black experience in, 23, 32–33 Demby, William, 58 Dickens, Charles, 25

136

Index

“Did You Ever Dream Lucky?” 40 DiPrima, Diane, 58, 59 Direction, 37, 121 disenfranchisement, 12 dispossession, 91, 96, 97, 101 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 25, 34, 69 Douglass, Frederick, 67, 100, 104 Dred Scott decision, 13 Drye, Frank, 24 Du Bois, W. E. B., 11, 48, 51, 71, 72 Dupre (C), 68, 113

music apprenticeship, 23, 24, 121 the New York years, 27–34, 41, 121 novellas, 35 only novel, 8, 39–40, 118 philosophy of, 98 politics and, 8, 36, 45, 58–61 posthumous publications, 45, 118, 125 publication and fame, 35–45, 57, 58, 122 quotes, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 22, 24, 26, 27, 33, 38, 42, 47, 63 recrimination, 42, 45, 59, 60 sexist attitude, 103–104 short stories, 35, 37, 39–40, 121–125 as teacher, 40 tribute to, 44 as trumpet musician, 17–18, 22–23, 36, 120 at Tuskegee, 24–27, 121 the writing life, 34–35 Emerson, Mr. (C), 64–65, 80–82, 115 Emerson, Mr. (son) (C), 64–65, 81–82, 96 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11, 72 Emma (C), 93, 111, 112 equality, social/racial, 55, 72, 74, 88, 101, 103, 107 European colonialism, 55

Ellison, Herbert Maurice, 13, 14, 120 Ellison, Ida, 11–14, 16–17, 34, 120, 121 Ellison, Lewis, 11–14, 120 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 10 aspirations as a writer, 17 black/white relationships, 17 as composer, 7, 23, 24 as controversial, 6, 8 death of, 9, 45, 124 as editor, 37, 122 essays, 8, 36, 39–40, 118, 123, 124, 125 family background and childhood, 10, 11–25, 47, 120 honors, 9, 32, 39–40, 56, 123–124 interest in music, 7, 14–18, 15, 22–23, 28, 121 as literary critic, 7, 8, 37, 121, 122 as literature student, 25, 26 marriages, 36, 121, 122 meaning of art, 22, 44 in Merchant Marines, 35, 122

Fair Employment Practices Commission, 52 Fascism, 54 fatherhood, theme of, 108 Fauset, Jessie, 48 Fielding, Henry, 25

137

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Fisher, Rudolph, 48 “Flying Home,” 35, 122 Flying Home and Other Stories, 45, 125 For My People, 56 Frederick Douglass School, 16, 120 free will, necessity of, 69

Hebestreit, Ludwig, 18 Hemingway, Ernest, 34, 35, 39 High Fidelity magazine, 39, 123 hip hop music, 22 hole, falling down, metaphors, 68, 83, 91, 101, 105, 107, 115–116 Homer, the Greek epic poet, 65 Home to Harlem, 48 Horizon magazine, 38, 122 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 55 Hughes, Langston, 30, 48, 49, 51 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 37 “Hymie’s Bull,” 34, 121

Gaines, Ernest, 61 Garvey, Marcus, 28, 29, 51, 99 Gillespie, Dizzy, 56 Going to the Territory, 8, 40, 118, 124 Golden Day tavern (C), 64, 73–74, 77, 78, 117 “Goodnight, Irene,” 35 Good Samaritan, 66, 87 Great Depression, 14, 28, 52 Greenwich Village, 30, 58 Guggenheimer, Ida Espen, 37

Invisible Man (C), 63–64, 69–75, 77–78 accepting black cultural reality, 78, 80–81, 89–90, 91 battle royal, 70–72 becoming Rinehart, 109–111 the Brotherhood, 92–94 dispossession, 90–92 funeral for Clifton, 106–109 the Golden Day, 73–74 Harlem and Todd Clifton, 98–100 I Yam What I Am, 88–90 the job hunt, 80–82 leaving Mary’s, 94–95 Liberty Paints, 82–87 life underground, 115–116 Mary Rambo and, 87–88 new life, 97–98 a new strategy, 111–113

Hambro (Brother) (C), 97, 98, 109–111 Hamlin, Eva, 27 Hansberry, Lorraine, 58 “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” 35 Hardy, Thomas, 25 Harlem, 28, 30, 33, 38, 55, 58 in Invisible Man, 63, 67–68, 79, 87, 96, 98–100, 103–104, 106–107, 109–113 Harlem Renaissance, 47–52, 50 Harlem Riot, 112, 113–115, 114 Harrison, Hazel, 24 Harvard University, 40 Haydn, Hiram, 39

138

Index

New York City, 78–79 personal growth/lessons learned, 78, 79, 112, 115–117 as reborn/remade, 86, 94, 96, 98 relationship to other characters, 63–68 repercussions, 75–78 Sambo dolls and Clifton’s death, 104–106 speaking at a rally, 95–97 trouble with Wrestrum, 102–104 Tuskegee University, 72–73 Invisible Man, 6, 25, 27–28, 44, 46 battle royal sequence, 70–72, 96, 98, 99, 107, 112 blindness and clear vision/light and shadow theme, 68, 70, 79, 82, 93, 96, 97, 109 chapters 1 through 6, 70–78 chapters 7 through 12, 78–88 chapters 13 through 17, 88–100 chapters 18 through 25, 100–116 dedication, 37 as education novel, 68–70, 78, 79, 112 epilogue, 116–117 inspirations for, 25–28, 30 major characters for, 63–68 metaphors/imagery, 68, 73, 83, 84, 91, 96, 97, 101, 105, 107 multiculturalism in, 60, 100 as only novel, 8 parallels in, 68, 100,114 prologue section, 38, 62, 68–70, 108, 122

published, 7, 38, 40, 122 quotes from, 86 reviews, 38 scope of, 38–39 speechmaking theme, 7, 88, 91–92, 96–97, 100, 106–107 symbolism, 72–74, 84, 86–87, 89–90, 102, 109 themes, 58, 63, 68, 71, 93, 97, 100, 106, 108, 109 vernacular narratives, 73, 75 writing of, 35–37, 122 writing style, 39 Jack, (Brother) (C), 66, 92–98, 100, 103–104, 107–109, 111, 115 Jackson, Lawrence, 18, 24, 30 jam sessions, 21 jazz music, 7, 16, 18–21, 20, 24, 28, 40, 47, 123 “cool jazz,” 56 discipline of, 22 musicians, 46, 48, 58 shift to Bebop, 55, 56 Jim Crow, 33 Johnson, Charles S., 48, 61 Johnson, Jack, 72 Johnson, James Weldon, 48 Johnson, Lyndon, 45, 59, 60, 124 Jolly Dollar (C), 104, 110 Jones, LeRoi, 42, 58, 59. See also Amiri Baraka. Joyce, James, 34, 98 Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, 37, 122 “Juneteenth,” 40, 123 Juneteenth, 43, 45, 118, 125 Kelly, William Melvin, 58 Kimbro (C), 83

139

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

“Last Day,” 35 Lee, Harper, 8 leftist “revolutionary” politics, 8, 30, 38, 58, 60, 116 Lewis, John, 56 Lewisohn, Milt, 17 Lewisohn’s Clothing Store, 17 Liberty Paints (C), 65, 66, 82–87, 102 light and shadow theme, 68, 70, 79, 82, 93, 96, 97, 109 literacy tests, 12 Literary Digest, 17 “Living with Music,” 39, 118, 123 Locke, Alain, 30, 48 Long Island University, 40

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 11, 51 National Book Award for fiction (1953), 39, 56, 123 nationalism, ethnic/racial, 51, 52 National League Pennant (1951), 54 Native Son, 36, 121 Naylor, Gloria, 61 Nazism, 55 need to move without moving metaphor, 73 Negro Folk Symphony, 24 Negro League baseball, 22 The Negro Quarterly, 37, 122 New Challenge, 33, 34 New Masses, 37, 121 New Negro Renaissance, (Harlem Renaissance), 47–52, 50 New World Writing, 40 New York City Ellison in, 27–34, 41 in Invisible Man, 78–79 New York Negro, 95 New York University, 40, 124 New York Writers’ Project, 37 Norton, Mr. (C), 64, 72–75, 77–78, 96, 102, 115, 117 Notes From Underground, 69, 70

Maceo (Brother) (C), 104, 110 machine-parts symbolism, 72–73, 84, 102 Major League Baseball, 54 Malraux, André, 30, 32, 124 Man’s Fate, 30 Marxism, 30 McConnell, Fanny, 36, 45, 122 McKay, Claude, 48, 51 Medicare, 59 Men’s House (C), 79, 87 mentorship, 45, 49 Merchant Marine, 35, 122 The Messenger magazine, 48, 51 military, desegregation of, 53, 54 Mills, Florence, 48 “Mister Toussan,” 37 Monk, Thelonious, 56 Morrison, Toni, 61 multiculturalism, 60, 101, 116

Oedipal complex, 85 Oklahoma City, 23, 39, 120 Deep Second section, 19 segregation in vs. Deep South, 12, 14, 17, 32–33 Oklahoma City Blue Devils, 19, 20, 21, 28 The Old Man and the Sea, 39

140

Index

Opportunity magazine, 48 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 18 Owen, Chandler, 51

Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer (C), 28,51, 60, 63, 66–67, 79, 99–100,104, 109–110, 113, 115 Reconstruction, 38 The Republic, 68 Reynal and Hitchcock, 35, 38 “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 36, 122 Riley (C), 40 Rinehart (C), 109, 110, 112, 113 Riverside Park, New York City, 44 Roach, Max, 56 Robeson, Paul, 48, 55 Robinson, Jackie, 52, 54, 55 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Rushing, Jimmy, 19, 21 Russian Revolution, 51 Rutgers University, 40

Page, Walter, 19 Pan-Africanism, 51 Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 56 partial blindness symbolism, 109 Partisan Review, 38, 122, 123 Pearl Harbor, 52 Philadelphia Phillies, 54 Plato’s Cave allegory, 68, 69, 71, 82 Poindexter, Rose, 36, 121, 122 Powell, Bud, 56 Prix de Rome fellowship, 39, 123 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 56

Sambo dolls, 104–106, 110, 113, 115 Savage, Augusta, 27, 30 Scofield (C), 68, 113 Scott, Emmett J., 27, 75 Scott, Walter, 25 segregation, 12, 14, 52, 71–72, 101 laws, 12 military, 53, 54 Shadow and Act, 8, 24, 40, 118, 123 slavery, 13, 17, 19, 33, 38 Slick, 35, 121 “Slick Gonna Learn,” 37, 121 Smith, William Gardner, 58 Snyder, Gary, 58 social equality, 55, 72, 74, 88, 101, 103, 107 socialism, 52

race, sociology of, 26, 54 race consciousness, 8 race records, 47 race riot, 112, 113–115, 114 racial equality. See social equality. racial integration, 51 racial politics, 58–61, 63 racial violence, 52, 63 racism, 11, 26, 28 black writing and, 56 discrediting, 55 in Invisible Man, 70 in labor movement, 84–85 A Raisin in the Sun, 58 Rambo, Mary (C), 66, 87–88, 93–95, 115 Rampersad, Arnold, 37 Randolph, A. Philip, 51, 52 Random House, 38

141

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

social responsibility, 72, 78, 88, 107, 117 “Society, Morality and the Novel,” 39 Socrates, 68 Soviet Union, 51, 55, 111 Sparland, “Old Man” (C), 84 speechmaking theme, 71, 88, 91–92, 96–97, 100, 106–107 sports metaphor, 96, 97 Sprague, Morteza, 24–25 Stalin, Joseph, 36 Stein, Gertrude, 34 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 30 Supercargo (C), 74 superego symbolism, 74 swing music, 56 Sybil (C), 67, 112–113

Tuskegee University, 14, 15, 23–28,34, 40, 76, 77 Invisible Man and, 72–73, 75, 81–82 Music School, 24, 25, 121 return to, 39

Talented Tenth theory, 71, 72 Tarp, (Brother) (C), 67, 100–102, 104, 105, 110 “That I Had Wings,” 37 These Low Grounds, 34, 121 Third International, Moscow, 51 Thompson, Louise, 30 Thurman, Wallace, 48 Tillman and Tackhead, 35 Time magazine, 58 Tobitt (Brother) (C), 67, 108 To Kill a Mockingbird, 8 Toomer, Jean, 48 traitor, meaning of, 108, 109 Trollope, Anthony, 25 Trueblood, Jim (C), 64, 73, 77, 96 Trueblood, Kate (C), 73 Trueblood, Matty Lou (C), 73 Truman, Harry, 52, 54 Turpin, Waters, 34, 121 Tuskegee Airmen, 53

Vanity Fair, 17 Vietnam War, 45, 58, 59, 60 vote, right to, 12, 13 voter responsibility, 12 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 59

umbilical cord symbolism, 86 Uncle Tom, 42, 64 Uncle Tom’s Children, 36 U.S. Constitution, 13 United States metaphor, 84 U.S. Supreme Court, 13 Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, 51 Up from Slavery, 75 utilitarianism, 69

Wagner, Richard, 24 Wake Forest College, 40 Walker, Alice, 61 Walker, Margaret, 56 Wall, Jeff, 62 War on Poverty, 59 Washington, Booker T., 27, 65, 72, 93, 98 Atlanta Compromise speech, 71 myth of legendary founder, 75, 76 as the Wizard, 77 Wesleyan University, 40 West, Dorothy, 34 Wheatstraw, Peetie, 65, 80

142

Index

Woodridge (C), 25, 26 World War II, 7, 9, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 123 Wrestrum (Brother) (C), 67, 97, 102, 103 Wright, Richard, 31, 32–34, 36, 39, 51, 56, 57, 121, 122

Wheatstraw, Peter (C), 65, 80, 81 white middle-class society, 17–18 whiteness, theme of, 83, 84, 88, 97, 100 Wideman, John Edgar, 61 Williams, John A., 58 Williams College, 40 Wizard of Oz, 77 Woman Question (C), 103–104, 108, 112

Yale Younger Poets Award, 56 YMCA, Harlem, 28

143

About the Author GERALD EARLY is a noted essayist, professor of English, African and African-American studies and of American culture studies. Dr. Early won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for his essay collection The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. He has written on Motown, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and many others, and acted as a consultant on Ken Burns’s documentary films, Baseball and Jazz, which aired on PBS. He is married to Ida Early, and has two daughters. This is his first book for Marshall Cavendish Benchmark.